Twitter is paying my rent…

There is a lot of negative chat about Twitter – broken business model, river of crap etc. etc. so I thought it was interesting to post this excerpt from Twitter is paying my rent over on Marshall Kirkpatrick’s blog:

People laugh at Twitter, and they can go ahead and laugh for all I care, but I’m here to tell you that it can be invaluable. Aside from the personal connectedness and relationship maintenance it’s good for, let’s be honest – it’s paying my rent. (Thanks Twitter!) I don’t mean they’ve hired me as a consultant, though I would love that, I mean Twitter is great for news discovery. Read on for my thoughts on how you can use Twitter more effectively, but keep in mind that communication has its own inherent value – I swear that’s what I like best about Twitter!

Personally, I’m with Marshall. I wish I was managing to put more in to Twitter, but from my limited engagement I get the twin benefits of timely newsflow (I learnt about Edmund Hillary’s death first on Twitter) and connectedness with my friends.

Elliot

There's no doubt that the folks over at Obvious have what's possibly one of the most compelling social services of the 2.0 era in their hands at the moment. The question is at what cost?

From my perspective (working day & night on my own SMS startup here in the UK) my main criticism of Twitter is just how passive they're being about 'improving the service' as opposed to building out a valid business model.

It would be a mistake to place Twitter under the same umbrella the tech community places the other social networking / blogging services of the world. Twitter isn't one of the services that has the comfort of 'scaling quickly now and worrying about monetisation later' - there's a lot of components that go into service, the main one arguably being SMS. The direct correlation between the services popularity and it's (rather expensive) costs can't be ignored for much longer.

I've spent a considerable amount of time working on my own startup exploring the efficacy of methods to deliver SMS based ads in the most targeted format possible. Twitter, should they choose this model are going to face a very unique challenge considering the bread and butter of their system is social content as opposed to ,say, search results (google anyone?). Should they choose a paid model, well it's probable the user base would take a huge blow.

It seems that in the height of the 2.0 era people have got too used to building products around the idea 'hmm I bet this would be REALLY popular...' as opposed to 'hmm I bet what this be REALLY popular...and profitable.'

Twitter: definitely an ingenious service, but one that can be turned into a profitable business given a $5m Series B?
Probably not.