>> By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success > Revenue - Cost is perhaps the most normal metric Badly chosen phrase. I'm not saying that currently Twitte

>> By any normal metric, Twitter is a huge success > Revenue - Cost is perhaps the most normal metric Badly chosen phrase. I'm not saying that currently Twitter is not a business failure--it is, at the moment. But from the perspective of providing value to many people, it's doing very well. Plus, the cost part of the equation is driven at this point largely by trying to figure out how to make more money, not by continuing to provide a valuable service to users. (The making-more-money thing is obviously not working yet.) The alternative model is: lower costs drastically by focusing on doing a handful of useful things well. And then you might be able to raise the money to cover those costs the way Wikipedia does.