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The past year and half, Twitter has given me the distinct impression of being the dog that chased a car and actually got the car, now it does not know what to d
by codelust 16y ago
The past year and half, Twitter has given me the distinct impression of being the dog that chased a car and actually got the car, now it does not know what to do with the car.
For a more reasonable analogy, Twitter is the equivalent of a telco. They are the plumbing and the dumb pipe of the 140 character web at the moment. That alone does not guarantee enough returns to justify the billion-plus dollar valuation. Sadly, they don't have any other choice than to stifle the same community that built the tooling which led them to be the success story they are today.
- br1 16y agoThe telco analogy is gold. Hopefully twitter and telcos have the same dead future in store.
- codelust 16y agoThanks :) I am a convert - from an eternal pessimist to a nouveau-optimist. But, even that does not spare me from being very pessimistic about the eventual fate of Twitter. The company, apparently (http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/c82cd59c7a87216a?hl=en_US http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_t...), grew 3x in terms of volume of messaging in the past 12-months, but it is very unlikely that their revenue has grown 3x. If that assumption is right, they are on a limited timeframe where their burn rate will eclipse their average possible spends (funds brought in via investments + revenue). In effect, they have a very short time frame to get this story right - irrespective of whether they piss off the developer ecosystem or not. I don't like "dead future" stories, but I don't think this is going to wind up with a different fate.