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There's a difference between not having a business model and waiting for the proper time to spring it on your customers. In the case of twitter, the author is

by smoody 18y ago

There's a difference between not having a business model and waiting for the proper time to spring it on your customers. In the case of twitter, the author is being a little bit short sighted. More and more companies are using twitter to form tighter relationships with their customers. It is a no-brainer for Twitter to charge them once it becomes common practice. That's just one example. I predict that Twitter will become one of the net's great success stories and people will have a hard time remembering that when it first launched, it was nothing more than a couple of hundred people twittering "I'm bored." As far as Seesmic goes, well, it's a little tougher to guess, but my guess is that they're hoping that their video commenting service becomes so addictive and important to companies that they'll pay to have video comments included on their sites. Will they succeed? Unclear. But it's not like when asked "what's your business model" that they said "uh, we don't have one" and it's short sighted to think that. Seesmic also owns that twitter client. Downloadable clients are trojan horses. Once you get enough people using them, almost anything is possible.

DanielBMarkham 18y ago
I'm curious as to how companies are forming tighter relationships using twitter. Got any links for that? I'm having a hard time understanding what a tweet would do that an SMS message, IM, or email wouldn't do.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  Tweets are asynchronous, unlike SMS and IM. I can read them when I want. I don't have to be running the client at the time they are sent. And they don't get spam filtered, nor do I get phishing Tweets from people pretending to be my hosting company. Remember all those harebrained schemes to charge companies tiny amounts of money for guaranteed-delivery emails with verified sender IDs? Twitter just deployed that system right under our noses.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
    - mechanical_fish 18y ago
      Oops! Let me amend my statement, then: Twitter is a stream separate from your SMS, so you have the option of treating those two streams separately. For example, I treat SMS like a sort of semi-synchronous channel: I leave my SMS alerts on so that my phone beeps whenever I receive one, and then I reserve that channel for my friends and family. Sorry, I'm not much of an SMS user, so I lack sophistication with it. And I sometimes forget that my personal quirks are not generally applicable. While I'm correcting myself, let me note that sending an SMS costs money. That money may add up if you're blasting SMS messages to 10k customers at once. Of course, we're discussing the possibility that Twitter may end up costing money too, but perhaps it will still be cheaper.
  - Angostura 18y ago
    In what way are you required to read an SMS the moment that it arrives?
    - lehmannro 18y ago
      You can refuse to read messages in any medium after all. For SMS, though, the reader (often a mobile phone device) has to read the message the moment it arrives (or it, well, won't arrive). Since tweets are not limited to one person, reading Twitter can happen asynchronously.
      - notauser 18y ago
        Unless the American carriers have managed to screw up one more technology (which is entirely possible) SMS is asynchronous. When you turn the device on it receives all the messages queued in the network. If your device is off when your network gets an incoming SMS, the store-and-forward system just holds it until it can be delivered. This is exactly the same behaviour as Twitter or indeed e-mail. My carrier can send SMS to multiple devices, or I can pick them up via a web portal, or via e-mail.
  - axod 18y ago
    "And they don't get spam filtered, nor do I get phishing Tweets from people pretending to be my hosting company." ...yet.
mechanical_fish 18y ago
There's a difference between not having a business model and waiting for the proper time to spring it on your customers. Precisely. Monetizing Twitter is a no-brainer if it has to happen. If the company runs out of money, they could do a token layoff of a couple people, issue a desperate plea to their user community with the headline SAVE TWITTER, and a bunch of us will pony up $19.99 a year. I don't expect them to do that. There are all sorts of more subtle ways to bring in money, and I expect that they will try all of those first, serially or in parallel. They're trying to be very sure not to set a price so high that they can be undercut. If they avoid that mistake, they can own their niche for a decade or more. It's also obvious why we haven't seen any attempts yet: Twitter is still recovering from the effects of the Fail Whale phase. Now that Twitter operations are stabilized, I believe they still have a bunch of smaller competitors. It would be a mistake to drive traffic to those competitors by inelegant monetizing. It would be a better idea to let the competition die from lack of oxygen first. It would be even better if some of Twitter's competitors, driven by necessity, were compelled to experiment with charging money before Twitter does. Some of the best market research is that which your competitors do for free. And, best of all, one of the competitors might succeed in finding a monetization model that can keep them alive... and then Twitter can copy that model, but with a massive advantage in network effect and scalability.
- smledbetter 18y ago
  How nice does your board have to be if their response to, "I'm waiting for my competitors to come up with a monetization model" is "OK, Twitter. Here's a bunch more cash for you to burn through."
Angostura 18y ago
...and I predict that once Twitter tries to charges a corporates it will be replaced by an RSS Feed.

by smoody 18y ago

DanielBMarkham 18y ago

I'm curious as to how companies are forming tighter relationships using twitter. Got any links for that? I'm having a hard time understanding what a tweet would do that an SMS message, IM, or email wouldn't do.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
Tweets are asynchronous, unlike SMS and IM. I can read them when I want. I don't have to be running the client at the time they are sent. And they don't get spam filtered, nor do I get phishing Tweets from people pretending to be my hosting company. Remember all those harebrained schemes to charge companies tiny amounts of money for guaranteed-delivery emails with verified sender IDs? Twitter just deployed that system right under our noses.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    Oops! Let me amend my statement, then: Twitter is a stream separate from your SMS, so you have the option of treating those two streams separately. For example, I treat SMS like a sort of semi-synchronous channel: I leave my SMS alerts on so that my phone beeps whenever I receive one, and then I reserve that channel for my friends and family. Sorry, I'm not much of an SMS user, so I lack sophistication with it. And I sometimes forget that my personal quirks are not generally applicable. While I'm correcting myself, let me note that sending an SMS costs money. That money may add up if you're blasting SMS messages to 10k customers at once. Of course, we're discussing the possibility that Twitter may end up costing money too, but perhaps it will still be cheaper.
- Angostura 18y ago
  In what way are you required to read an SMS the moment that it arrives?
  - lehmannro 18y ago
    You can refuse to read messages in any medium after all. For SMS, though, the reader (often a mobile phone device) has to read the message the moment it arrives (or it, well, won't arrive). Since tweets are not limited to one person, reading Twitter can happen asynchronously.
    - notauser 18y ago
      Unless the American carriers have managed to screw up one more technology (which is entirely possible) SMS is asynchronous. When you turn the device on it receives all the messages queued in the network. If your device is off when your network gets an incoming SMS, the store-and-forward system just holds it until it can be delivered. This is exactly the same behaviour as Twitter or indeed e-mail. My carrier can send SMS to multiple devices, or I can pick them up via a web portal, or via e-mail.
- axod 18y ago
  "And they don't get spam filtered, nor do I get phishing Tweets from people pretending to be my hosting company." ...yet.

mechanical_fish 18y ago

There's a difference between not having a business model and waiting for the proper time to spring it on your customers. Precisely. Monetizing Twitter is a no-brainer if it has to happen. If the company runs out of money, they could do a token layoff of a couple people, issue a desperate plea to their user community with the headline SAVE TWITTER, and a bunch of us will pony up $19.99 a year. I don't expect them to do that. There are all sorts of more subtle ways to bring in money, and I expect that they will try all of those first, serially or in parallel. They're trying to be very sure not to set a price so high that they can be undercut. If they avoid that mistake, they can own their niche for a decade or more. It's also obvious why we haven't seen any attempts yet: Twitter is still recovering from the effects of the Fail Whale phase. Now that Twitter operations are stabilized, I believe they still have a bunch of smaller competitors. It would be a mistake to drive traffic to those competitors by inelegant monetizing. It would be a better idea to let the competition die from lack of oxygen first. It would be even better if some of Twitter's competitors, driven by necessity, were compelled to experiment with charging money before Twitter does. Some of the best market research is that which your competitors do for free. And, best of all, one of the competitors might succeed in finding a monetization model that can keep them alive... and then Twitter can copy that model, but with a massive advantage in network effect and scalability.

smledbetter 18y ago
How nice does your board have to be if their response to, "I'm waiting for my competitors to come up with a monetization model" is "OK, Twitter. Here's a bunch more cash for you to burn through."

Angostura 18y ago

...and I predict that once Twitter tries to charges a corporates it will be replaced by an RSS Feed.