There's a difference between not having a business model and waiting for the proper time to spring it on your customers.
In the case of twitter, the author is being a little bit short sighted. More and more companies are using twitter to form tighter relationships with their customers. It is a no-brainer for Twitter to charge them once it becomes common practice. That's just one example. I predict that Twitter will become one of the net's great success stories and people will have a hard time remembering that when it first launched, it was nothing more than a couple of hundred people twittering "I'm bored."
As far as Seesmic goes, well, it's a little tougher to guess, but my guess is that they're hoping that their video commenting service becomes so addictive and important to companies that they'll pay to have video comments included on their sites. Will they succeed? Unclear. But it's not like when asked "what's your business model" that they said "uh, we don't have one" and it's short sighted to think that. Seesmic also owns that twitter client. Downloadable clients are trojan horses. Once you get enough people using them, almost anything is possible.
There's a difference between not having a business model and waiting for the proper time to spring it on your customers.
Precisely. Monetizing Twitter is a no-brainer if it has to happen. If the company runs out of money, they could do a token layoff of a couple people, issue a desperate plea to their user community with the headline SAVE TWITTER, and a bunch of us will pony up $19.99 a year.
I don't expect them to do that. There are all sorts of more subtle ways to bring in money, and I expect that they will try all of those first, serially or in parallel. They're trying to be very sure not to set a price so high that they can be undercut. If they avoid that mistake, they can own their niche for a decade or more.
It's also obvious why we haven't seen any attempts yet: Twitter is still recovering from the effects of the Fail Whale phase.
Now that Twitter operations are stabilized, I believe they still have a bunch of smaller competitors. It would be a mistake to drive traffic to those competitors by inelegant monetizing. It would be a better idea to let the competition die from lack of oxygen first. It would be even better if some of Twitter's competitors, driven by necessity, were compelled to experiment with charging money before Twitter does. Some of the best market research is that which your competitors do for free. And, best of all, one of the competitors might succeed in finding a monetization model that can keep them alive... and then Twitter can copy that model, but with a massive advantage in network effect and scalability.
How nice does your board have to be if their response to, "I'm waiting for my competitors to come up with a monetization model" is "OK, Twitter. Here's a bunch more cash for you to burn through."
I'm curious as to how companies are forming tighter relationships using twitter. Got any links for that? I'm having a hard time understanding what a tweet would do that an SMS message, IM, or email wouldn't do.
Tweets are asynchronous, unlike SMS and IM. I can read them when I want. I don't have to be running the client at the time they are sent.
And they don't get spam filtered, nor do I get phishing Tweets from people pretending to be my hosting company.
Remember all those harebrained schemes to charge companies tiny amounts of money for guaranteed-delivery emails with verified sender IDs? Twitter just deployed that system right under our noses.
You can refuse to read messages in any medium after all.
For SMS, though, the reader (often a mobile phone device) has to read the message the moment it arrives (or it, well, won't arrive). Since tweets are not limited to one person, reading Twitter can happen asynchronously.
Unless the American carriers have managed to screw up one more technology (which is entirely possible) SMS is asynchronous. When you turn the device on it receives all the messages queued in the network.
If your device is off when your network gets an incoming SMS, the store-and-forward system just holds it until it can be delivered. This is exactly the same behaviour as Twitter or indeed e-mail.
My carrier can send SMS to multiple devices, or I can pick them up via a web portal, or via e-mail.
Oops! Let me amend my statement, then: Twitter is a stream separate from your SMS, so you have the option of treating those two streams separately. For example, I treat SMS like a sort of semi-synchronous channel: I leave my SMS alerts on so that my phone beeps whenever I receive one, and then I reserve that channel for my friends and family.
Sorry, I'm not much of an SMS user, so I lack sophistication with it. And I sometimes forget that my personal quirks are not generally applicable.
While I'm correcting myself, let me note that sending an SMS costs money. That money may add up if you're blasting SMS messages to 10k customers at once. Of course, we're discussing the possibility that Twitter may end up costing money too, but perhaps it will still be cheaper.
I recently bitched on Twitter about my bad HD service from Comcast, within minutes I had a reply from a Comcast rep on Twitter offering to fix my problem. Within hours I had a phone call from another rep who left me her direct line and told me to call anytime the symptoms appeared.
If Twitter can make Comcast connect with their customers better, anything is possible.
That is actually a very good idea. A truly independent open channel for business to consumer. Public image matters more than ever, specially in this turbulent times where people are reconsidering paid services.
But I still don't see how Twitter can cash in without impacting the freedom and openness of its service. Why would Comcast start paying them something they get for free?
I never tried Twitter, and I have a hard time figuring out how that could happen. Does Comcast receive a notification whenever "Comcast" gets entered in a Twitter post?
there is a twitter dude named comcastcares (maybe above that is you).
Regarding this post - HA. Unless all entrepreneurs band together and force consumers to start paying for our wares then the Twitter's and Seesmic's will continue. Maybe not during and somewhat after this economic shake up, but in time things will go back to how they were. Consumers have been weened on free; expect it!
The same happened to me with VMWare Fusion. I posted some problem I had and within some minutes I had a response from the VMWare guys offering me help on the problem.
I don't know how many people twitter has, but I bet if it was done in dotcom days, it would have 20 times people/servers/resources/burn rate that it does.
That concept is as dead as the Detroit Lions’ playoff hopes.
I somewhat wished bloggers would stop with the irreverent use of cultural icons with no substance value other than some blind synonymous nature of what they're reporting on. Not everyone wakes up with the analytical, yet still commentary skills as Chuck Klosterman.
Well, do we want Mark writing in his "speaking voice" or not? He and I used to play on the same Ultimate team. I don't recall him using that phrase back then, but if--and I say if--he would use that phrase in conversation to describe an Ultimate team, or a stock, or my chances of monetizing my own dead blog, then I'm okay with him using it in his blog.
Of course, if it's an affectation thrown in their to foster some sort of forced hippery or phoney commonality with his readers, then I agree it ought to go.
Given the surrounding context, it was just a poor analogy to draw.
"Twitter is as dead as a football team that's doing poorly"
It doesn't even make sense, if the only comparison to be made is that both seem to be without direction, and that's what gets to me. Everyone is demanding Twitter have some kind of grand scheme, plot, or plan. They seem to be doing very well so far without any of it; and that little distinctive remark really just doesn't help solidify the argument in this post that Twitter is in any definition of the word 'dead'.
The Lions comment just felt very kitschy and could have very well been left without; while I disagree on the premise of the article, the delivery otherwise is presentable.
it's also possible to use twitter to cross-promote a product to a wide userbase. pushing ads for their other products through twitter would be simple. letting other people do it would also be simple.
even failing that, the success of twitter gives the people who are currently working on it a lot of credit for future products. it's not a revenue-generator immediately, but it builds faith. i think the author's focus is a little too short-term.
In the case of twitter, the author is being a little bit short sighted. More and more companies are using twitter to form tighter relationships with their customers. It is a no-brainer for Twitter to charge them once it becomes common practice. That's just one example. I predict that Twitter will become one of the net's great success stories and people will have a hard time remembering that when it first launched, it was nothing more than a couple of hundred people twittering "I'm bored."
As far as Seesmic goes, well, it's a little tougher to guess, but my guess is that they're hoping that their video commenting service becomes so addictive and important to companies that they'll pay to have video comments included on their sites. Will they succeed? Unclear. But it's not like when asked "what's your business model" that they said "uh, we don't have one" and it's short sighted to think that. Seesmic also owns that twitter client. Downloadable clients are trojan horses. Once you get enough people using them, almost anything is possible.