Twitter's Enormous Success

Twitter has increased more than 1,300 percent in the last year. In comparison, Facebook only grew 228 percent.

Twitter is an online social network where the user only post 140-character blog about their current status. People can constantly update their status and track the statuses of their friends. Recently many celebrities and politicians have began using it and people have gone crazy over wanting to know what these people (who they never meet nor have any relation to) are doing.

All of the success came at a cost. Twitter is more mainstream now but it has lost some of the people who made it what it is today. A CNN article said "Some users say Twitter has outgrown its core audience and is irrelevant to the technophiles who made it popular in the first place. Others are annoyed by the flood of spammers and profiteers who now use the site's popularity to make a buck."

Here is a link to the article:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/31/twitter.fail.whale/?iref=t2test_techtues

Twitter's success is definitely astonishing, but the real question is, where do they go from here? One of the main problems Twitter has to address is, How do we make money? Here is an interesting article expanding on that topic: http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=366

-Bryan

This article just calls out the companies that thought they found the advertising goldmine of facebook, myspace, youtube... Basically just proposing the views of many people that all the advertising on these sites only drives away users since they are not there looking to be marketed too. Twitter I'm sure is and will follow myspace and others into the ground making its self a spam filled billboard as opposed to any sort of useful social venue.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1888796,00.html

I think that its interesting that twitter has received 30 million dollars of venture capital and is valued from 75 - 250 million dollars according to Silicon Valley experts. You can see on twitter's website on the FAQ's:

"How do you make money from Twitter?

Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world. While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make."

They actively say that they are experiencing negative cash flow and they don't even have a business model. With no tangible asset's these venture capitalist's that have invested in twitter are definitely counting on a huge internet player to buy them out, even in this tough economy.

Carlos Calegari wrote:twitter are definitely counting on a huge internet player to buy them out, even in this tough economy.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/why-twitter-turned-down-facebook/

Facebook offered 500M and was rejected by Twitter. I am pretty sure they are trying to cook up a business model just like facebook is trying themselves.

An interesting aspect of Twitter that can relate to the formation of social networks is seen on this webpage created by a UMBC Research Group: http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2007/04/19/twitter-social-network-analysis/

On this webpage, two different social networks are displayed. The first network is comprised of 25 thousand Twitter users, and links nodes based on if a user is a friend of another user. Therefore, the network can link people who may not necessarily know each other personally, but rather people who are friends for no reason (i.e. people who friend celebrities for personal reasons).

The second network is based on node edges of mutual friends. In this case, both people know each other, so there are true friendships and acquaintances for the most part. It's interesting to note the makeup of the social networks in both these cases. In the first graph, the diameter of the social network is very large, with a cluster of edges linked to celebrities. In the second graph, the network has a smaller diameter, and less trees of networks are linked together. These graphs show how Twitter has grown as a social network, and provide insight to the networks created through the many acquaintances developed on a public site like Twitter.

One of Twitter's uses has been to conduct interviews, and a recent "Twitterview" with Twitter CEO Evan Williams is here: http://revision3.com/tekzilla/web20/

In the interview, Williams talks a lot about Twitter and its features, where it's headed, etc. What I thought was interesting though was his discussion about how businesses use Twitter. For example, Dell uses it to get out deals and a massage parlor uses it to let customers know about openings in the schedule that would have otherwise gone unfilled. This is an easy way for customers to get deals and businesses to take advantage of Twitter's quick response times.

Since it was mentioned that Twitter has problems coming up with money in its current business model, I think looking into a "Twitter tax" in which Twitter taxes this type of business exchange so Twitter makes some money out of it...Any ideas on this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/technology/internet/14twitter.html?_r=1&ref=business
An article in the NY times today outlines how companies can profit from twitter, not just through online advertising. It proposes how companies such as Starbucks or more recently, Amazon, can learn what the public thinks about their services or products.

The article also references how important it is for a company to acknowledge the twitter world. For example, one twitter post had remarked on how Amazon last weekend had reclassified gay and lesbian books as "adult," resulting in a widespread internet protest via blogs and tweets.

Twitter has made it so one person can get more views than a whole news group. Apparently Ashton Kutcher says if he beats CNN to one million viewers. Larry King is trying to get both Ashton Kutcher and Ted Turner on talk about it.

Here is a clip talking about it:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/04/14/nr.sanchez.kutchner.twitter.cnn

Apparently Ashton Kutcher won:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/17/ashton.cnn.twitter.battle/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

Twitter has recently launched Twitter Connect, a service allowing users to sign into 3rd party accounts using their Twitter account. This speeds up the process of filling out one's credentials. This article states how Twitter has "exploded in usage is because of its simplicity"; I am looking forward to seeing how this new application holds up to the rich get richer concept. Could this lead to an exponential increase in Twitter users?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/17/AR2009041703179.html

Easily the best thing that twitter has been used for this year was when the New York Times used the location-specific aspect of people tweeting and mapped it on a map of the United States and recorded it for the duration of the Superbowl. Using the map and creating a relationship between font-size and number of times the word is showing up in tweets for that point in time, users are able to pinpoint exactly when each team scored, made a great play, or when a commercial was amazing.

Interactive Map of Popular Superbowl Words

The idea that this can be used for historical purposes is very interesting, and it just shows how we can get the sense of how an entire social network feels from putting all this information in the same place. I can't even imagine how the next political campaign will use this to get a sense of what people are talking about when.