So? I used Twitter in 2006. My tweets were like, "going to the store now." "In line at the movie theater." etc. Literally, what are you doing right now? And that's what other people used it for, too.
It was popular even in 2006 and 2007, by web app standards. Right now it's ridiculously, explosively popular.
"It must have been hard to stay motivated, keep investors happy, and innovate from 2006-2008ish."
Just because you didn't use Twitter in 2006 doesn't mean it was a wasteland.
You're in completely different businesses, though. At this point, Twitter is a medium (as in new form of media). They may change their business, at some point, but right now, they have created a new broadcast medium, and they're doing what all media people try to do. Get as many viewers as possible. That's why they've had so much interest from other media companies and celebrities. CNN and Ashton Kutcher don't really understand software as a service. You're in a software as a service business.
Being technologists, I think that we understand the software and technologies quite well, but I think that it's easy for us to confuse the completely separate businesses that are being built using those technologies.
100 years ago the blacksmiths like my grandfather became car mechanics. The technologies both involved metal and fire, so the people that understood metal and fire became the people that fixed the horseless carriage. There really wasn't a mental divide for people involved in those businesses because the technologies were so similar.
In another 20 years, I think the distinction between software as media and software as a product ans software as a service is going to become a lot clearer. Until then, we're going to have a lot of confusion about this.
All this talk about twitter as a medium, twitter as revolutionizing communication, twitter as a service conveniently ignores the fact that twitter is a BUSINESS. It's purpose is to make money. Everything it does is subordinate to that goal. Maybe this wouldn't be true if it was just the founder's fun project, but it's not - they took tons and tons of VC money, invested on the assumption that they would be turning a profit. It doesn't matter how popular they are, or how many viewers they have if they can't leverage that into turning a profit.
In the words of Musashi - "The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him."
It makes absolutely no difference how popular or revolutionary you are if it doesn't make you any money.
And while in pre-internet times, when viewers translated directly into dollars (which is why it's got such high valuation), it would be a safe assumption that it will, it's far from clear that the same rule applies today. There's many huge services that aren't profitable because no one's figured out how to make money off of them yet. Saying something like "I have no doubt twitter will do very, very well" seems unjustified given the fickle nature of internet users and the fact that the rules for building a profitable online service are more alchemical than scientific at this point.
I still think the moment twitter try to turn on ads, they're doomed. Monetizing twitter is extremely non-trivial IMHO, especially after providing it completely free for so long.
Also for most people twitter is just the network their 3rd party twitter client is using. Monetizing that is really hard.
Not at all. I'm a founder working on a social news site for financial and business news. I did come to hacking after studying art, and motion graphics for a while. My wife is a video producer so I have a foot in the media world.
And, I'm not really worried about Twitter getting monetized. I have no doubt that the crew at Twitter is going to do very, very well.
(@ axod, reply link goes away after a while, so Ill reply here.)
Sometimes lack of innovation is also an innovation. The innovation has happened around uses of twitter, apps of twitter, not twitter itself.
And think of it this way, FB has way more features than twitter, and yet they had to introduce features which twitter had, and are competing with it.
With all respect, weren't people saying the same thing about Facebook only six months back. Sorry, but twitter a no revenues is a ead horse.It might fail or it might succeed, but their "no-revenues" is a well thought out decision, your businesses, probabably not.
>> "weren't people saying the same thing about Facebook only six months back"
Only people who didn't really understand a lot. Facebook has been making enough money to be profitable for ages. They could have been profitable years ago if they decided to cut back expenditure.
The difference is, as far as I understand, twitter could not just cut back expenditure and be profitable right now. They have to have decent revenue to do that, which they don't have.
I think it might be hard to monetize it, because as soon as they add any friction then perhaps competitive services will start up with the same API.
If someone else provided a twitter service, with the same API, then twitter clients (including web clients) could easily be updated to subscribe to both. Or any number of twitter services. Decentralized twitter. Is there any reason why tweets need to go through a central hub?
Competitive services have already been created. There have been attempts to do it all: decentralise it, improve it, extend it to more characters, add video, add photos. Especially during their bad points where they were down every 5 minutes due to load. Twitter has enough of a user base that its stupidly hard for anyone to compete with it. The core system is "very simple", the user base is what counts in this game.
It was popular even in 2006 and 2007, by web app standards. Right now it's ridiculously, explosively popular.
"It must have been hard to stay motivated, keep investors happy, and innovate from 2006-2008ish."
Just because you didn't use Twitter in 2006 doesn't mean it was a wasteland.