I hadn't used my twitter account in months and just this morning got notification that lucille166 was following me. Is lucille166 just another of my enamored female fans, you ask. Nope, a porn bot. I wonder how much of the increase can be attributed to the influx of spam/porn bots to this previously (I'm assuming) pristine online landscape.
That growth references traffic, I believe. But by many other accounts they are growing rapidly. I don't think spam/porn is a HUGE problem yet, tho I've seen more following me (@webwright) lately.
I've also heard that their API traffic is 20-30x their web traffic, so when you see their web graphs, that's worth pondering.
The problem IMHO will be the fact that it's reasonably easy to make money from their web traffic. Making money from API traffic seems downright impossible to me.
For me, Twitter shows potential of contributing to the "third places" of online life. The informal coffee shop where you're free to overhear conversations and join in when you want... but just as free to keep reading your book. No harm in sharing what's on your mind, no expectation to reply to what other people say. It helps that right now, it has a self-selected group of people who are pretty open-minded and have something interesting to say (but the narrowness of this self-selection will grow weaker with popularity).
I just started using it... I'd like it a lot more if Twitterific didn't keep automatically popping itself into the foreground with another "Twitter Error". Incessantly drives me nuts.
Several CNN anchors now have Twitter accounts and encourage users to ping them with questions or info. Once the big guys like Larry King or Wolf Blitzer start promoting their Twitter streams, Twitter growth will be explosive.
Everyone says this, and meanwhile we're watching companies with huge user bases flounder around helplessly without finding a way.
I think it's time we stop taking that for the gospel and admit that it's actually quite possible for a company to get a huge user base and still fail to make money permanently.
I'm very interested to see this play out. Pop wisdom says with enough eyes and with low enough operating costs there will be some way to make it as a company.
But there has to be an inflection point somewhere. Look at youtube, they will never be in the black (taken on their own).
So either they turn a profit, and this piece of wisdom is strongly reinforced. Or they go under, and entrepreneurs and VCs lose a certain glint in their eye. Or they get bought... and probably no one's mind is changed.
This explains why they turned off IM access. No need to view the web pages, and no ad views, via IM. And people will respond better to ads on web pages than ads via IM.
Facebook makes hundreds of millions annually. They could have been very profitable years ago (but chose instead to try for an even bigger hit). I don't know why people on this site keep talking about Facebook like it's a failed business.
Those options don't strike me as particularly strong. The assumption is that people won't mind ads in their updates, but that's something that has yet to be proven and could end up being a huge risk.
Nobody is clicking on the ads either. When Facebook finally did do something that might make money and forced people to pay attention (Beacon) it was so odious that they had to quit immediately or people would have started moving.
I think placing ads in the content (Messages) crosses a line of irritation. Imagine if gmail started inserting adverts inside your emails when you view them. How quickly do you think people would stop using gmail?
In order for Twitter to start a subscription model, they'd need international SMS (something they seem to have given up on, as third parties now provide paid SMS bundling) AND IM.
Today, I opened my T-Mo statement, and there was a Twitter ad inside. Still no IM and SMS, though. No matter how big their user base gets, that looks like a show stopper to me.
It is to some people, the 'Internet celebrity' (Calacanis etc.) crowd would gladly throw thousands/year at Twitter as it allows them to grow their image/social circle.
They can turn around tomorrow and say it'll cost 10 bucks a year to use it. Most people will pay to play, just because they've been sucked in. $10 x however many millions of users they have... you do that math!
They've started to allow users to place ads as their background...they could be the first service that figured out how to allow their users to make money before the actual company can!
They only lost out to fraud. Any company dealing with users and money experience this - look at PayPal.
AllAdvantage is a perfect example of why you can't allow client side services to be calculating things that really should be done server side. You could send a magical packet that would log all your hours for a month instantly.
422% growth in traffic is not 422% growth in registrations. There is a solid core of early adopters, but getting mainstream society to start Twittering -- especially when there are similar services offered by more popular platforms, such as Facebook -- will be a challenge.
But MSM seldom get it right. Remember the LA Times wikitorial? Or Wired's Second Life bureau? When's the last time you listened to a podcast produced by your local newspaper, or used the NYT's Blogrunner service? The media is desperate to "get" the Internet, but many times they simply end up jumping on the latest bandwagon, which fades after a year or two.
I am on twitter and use it a bit because I have found it an easier way to get the attention of some people in the Ruby community.
Anyways, I still feel like I don't really get Twitter. I read the NYT article, and i understand that many people don't subscribe to blog feeds, but I don't really get the point.
The only time I find it really useful is that it forms an impromptu chat room at any event by following the event name. Such as when I am at conferences you can view everyone's comments on the current speaker.
How interested would users be in a $0.10/message Twitter clone with (however many nines) guaranteed uptime? Twitter should limit the number of messages a regular user can send (over a given period, possibly) and charge a nominal premium fee or rate for the heaviest users. It's an obvious business model, and everybody wins (except for the heavy users who expect the service to be free of charge, who are thus kinda cheap).
That's a bad alignment to have if you want to make money. You especially want your biggest users to win. ISP bandwidth caps are a textbook example of how ISPs are struggling with this issue as we speak.
Right but downloading a DVD is definitely more demanding on any network than routing text messages and micro-blog posts. The revenue would make the product far more compelling for every-day use because there would be a guarantee of reliability, funded by subscription fees or rates. But infrequent users could use it for free (cap free messaging), and see ads.
