I'm skeptical that Twitter "lends itself brilliantly to commerce." First, Twitter pulled the plug on their @earlybrid project (http://twitter.com/earlybird htt

I'm skeptical that Twitter "lends itself brilliantly to commerce." First, Twitter pulled the plug on their @earlybrid project (http://twitter.com/earlybird http://twitter.com/earlybird). I know some companies who ran deals through them and they produced disappointing results. Any story about why the future of Twitter is commerce will have to account for that. Second, there have been major changes in online commerce over the last three years, most obviously with companies like Groupon and Gilt. Commercial activity on Twitter seems a little "tabula rasa" right now. There are companies out there actively changing the ecommerce landscape. Twitter has massive usage, but it's ability to augment commerce is still a promise. Facebook has had a much bigger impact in online commerce. Facebook Credits are going to be everywhere. You can already buy them at Target, or whatever. Groupon's marketing spend was dominated by Facebook ads for a long time, and they (along with Zynga) more than doubled the CPC for Facebook ads over the last two years. There are two $1Bn+ companies built right off the back of Facebook. What's the biggest company built on Twitter? I can't think of a single interesting one. The sociology of Facebook doesn't support "commerce" in the sense of making FB posts about things you've bought, but I don't know that Twitter does either. So we're talking about monetizing things indirectly, e.g., running ads targeted against their "interest graph." What Zynga and Groupon did were essentially find a better way to monetize Facebook users than Facebook itself had, and acquired those users by paying Facebook for the privilege. It all hinges on Twitter's advertising product. We'll see how compelling it is and if someone can build a Zynga or Groupon on top of Twitter the same way those companies were built on Facebook.