4 ms·
Looking at this as a complete outsider (and ignoring for a moment that the people running and backing Twitter are very smart and talented), Twitter's big-pictur
by cs702 14y ago
Looking at this as a complete outsider (and ignoring for a moment that the people running and backing Twitter are very smart and talented), Twitter's big-picture strategy seems rather similar to the plan hatched by the Underpants Gnomes of South Park[1]:
Phase 1: Collect users and developers (with a free service)
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit
Twitter seems to be smack in the middle of that awkward phase 2: they have a lot of users and developers, and now they need to figure out how to leverage the valuable social graph they've acquired to build a profitable, sustainable, defensible business. That's NOT easy.
I wish them success.
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[1] http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/151040/the-underpants-business http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/151040/the-underpants-...
- GuiA 14y agoThis observation is also applicable to pretty much every single social startup in existence.
- cookiecaper 14y agoMaybe they should just start courting some of the big media companies. I'm sure neither Time Warner or News Corp wants to go back to the days when they had to fill airtime with real content instead of reading tweets.
- kaonashi 14y agoProducts like this are quite socially and economically valuable, and also require a great deal of capital investment to make work. When the investments demands quick return, then those who have to make it all work seem to start making decisions that end up removing most of that value. So Twitter is quite valuable as infrastructure; but when they try to turn it into a product that they can use to return the investment, it ceases to be infrastructure and becomes less valuable.