Tag: Twitter

Twitter is a public utility

I have been using Twitter for 12 years and I love it more than ever.

For me, Twitter is not a social network. It’s an interest community. An idea network. More like a protocol. A global conversation protocol.

Twitter the business

I have trouble viewing Twitter as a regular tech company. Of course, I want Twitter the company to be sustainable and profitable. But, Twitter has a history of not being very good at monetization. It looks like this has improved, as Twitter has been profitable for the past 5 quarters.

I might be mistaken (and I hope that I am), but I don’t believe Twitter will ever find a similarly strong business model as Google or Facebook. So while I couldn’t be more excited about Twitter the product, I am not similarly excited about Twitter the business.

The role of Twitter in society

I believe Twitter plays a different role. More one of a protocol and public utility. Twitter enables real-time global conversation, and it does it better than any other tool. Well, not fully global, as Twitter is currently blocked in China, which might never be resolved. But this is a different story.

A decentralized future?

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, is also the CEO of Square, a mobile payments company. Both Jack and Square have been experimenting with and supporting Bitcoin for several years.

I have a strong conviction that the world is moving towards decentralization and privacy. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are an important catalyst for that. So how could Twitter look like in a decentralized, censorship-resistant world?

It could be similar to Steemit. The central database would be decentralized on a distributed ledger. Created content could not be controlled or censored. It only could be moderated in a limited way on the client layer. There would be multiple clients and user-experiences.

Without a central database, the current business model would be heavily disrupted. There would be no data licensing. And advertising would be harder, as there would be multiple clients.

Conclusion

Is that the future of Twitter? I don’t know. What I do know is that I love Twitter and the work of Jack Dorsey, and I will be watching and continue to cheer from the sidelines.

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This post has been inspired by the recent podcast episodes with Jack Dorsey, which allowed me to take a deep dive:

– Jack Dorsey on Roe Rogan Experience
– Jack Dorsey on Sam Harris
– Jack Dorsey on Tales from the Crypt
– Jack Dorsey on Stephan Livera


Twitter Early Days

I have finished reading the Twitter founding story. I remember when I signed up for Twitter in April 2007 and instantly fell in love. I loved the concept of ‘blogging via SMS’ and did it using my Palm Treo at the time.

Learnings:

  • Twitter was born because Odeo — a podcasting company — has failed and needed a new product. One reason why Odeo failed was because none of the founders and employees really used it. They weren’t really passionate about podcasting. Once they started with Twitter, everybody in the team immediately became a power user. This is an important principle: Build something for yourself. Eat your own dogfood. Watch out for the warning sign: If not even you are using your own product, this is not good.
  • The first version of Twitter was built in two weeks.
  • Odeo and Twitter were a pretty large mess internally. Lots of anarchy, no structure, weak leadership, lots of conflict, LOTS of outages (remember the Fail Whale?). I am a believer that companies die because of internal problems, not because of competition or external things. So I’m glad that Twitter managed to survive somehow, as it’s a very important service.
  • Some stories — especially descriptions of the behaviour of some involved people — were pretty irritating and scary. The author claims to have done a thorough research. As I don’t know the people personally and haven’t been there myself, I will not comment on those stories. The bottom line is: we are all human beings, and we all have our flaws. Startups are no different. You find ugly stuff there, as everywhere else. Be prepared for conflict, fights, broken friendships, struggle for power, and other ugly stuff.
  • For me the key success factor of Twitter was simplicity, usability, convenience and access. From the beginning I have used it as a microblog, and very soon it was my favourite way of blogging. The SMS part was key in the beginning. It was realtime, mobile communication in the pre-smartphone era. One time I tweeted that I was on my way to Munich, and suddenly a friend who lived near Berlin contacted me that he was in Munich as well. So we are able to meet up. Such experiences showed me the power and value of Twitter.
  • Twitter had no business model for the first 3 years. Zero revenues. At the same time they had to pay tens and later hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for SMSes alone. Not very cool. I wonder whether it is possible to build a service like Twitter or Facebook and from the beginning be cashflow positive with a sustainable business model. I believe that some sort of Freemium or Subscription business model should be possible. When WordPress.com started, people were selling subdomain names (e.g. cars.wordpress.com) on eBay for $100. WordPress.com could have sold those premium names. The same with Twitter. They could have sold 1/2/3/4/5-character user names. Or offer 10/20/30 SMS’s for free per month and if you wanted more you would have to pay. I easily would have paid $5 or $10 per month like I do for other services. I wonder whether this is possible. (My gut feelings say: Hell yes!!!). This lack of revenue generated huge pressure later on, which probably could have been avoided.
  • The goal of the current management team is to make Twitter a $100b company. Currently Twitter has a market cap of $31b.
  • The turning point for Twitter was the SXSW conference in 2007. They decided to take advantage of the conference by installing plasma screens with Twitter feeds and instructions of how to sign up. With that the critical mass was reached, press started to get obsessed by this new phenomenon and Twitter started to grow like crazy. In the first 6 months or so they only attracted a couple thousand users. So it didn’t take off immediately. However, the founders and team were already addicted and were using the service daily. This probably kept them going through the relative slow start. Again, it comes down to: Build something users want. Build something for yourself.
  • Unfortunately the book focused very strongly on the fights and personal conflicts. I would have wished to learn more about the product and the company itself, what the milestones were etc. Nevertheless a very interesting book about a product that I use and love.

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Evan Williams about Twitter

Excellent interview of Evan Williams by Mike Arrington.

  • Twitter (company profile) just bought Summize (company profile) and now redirected it to Twitter Search. I fell in love with Summize and think this is a VERY good move for Twitter. The deal was most stock and some cash. The Summize-CEO left, the rest of the team relocates to San Francisco. Most of the Summize-Staff are Ex-AOL people.
  • Twitter recently raised $15M in a Series C.
  • Twitter thinks about Premium-Models for commercial use and about monetization of Twitter Search with Contextual Ads (the latter could turn out to be BIG since search can generate very high CPMs)
  • I like Evan Williams very much and would love to meet him. His style is cool. Pyra was cool, Twitter is even cooler :-).
  • Conclusion: Twitter seems to become BIG

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Why I started using twitter

First of all, this interesting podcast with twitter co-founder Evan Williams (and co-founder of Blogger.com) made me sign up.

Things I learned:

#1: Twitter is so freakin’ easy. It just answers one simple question: What are you doing?

#2: Twitter is like mini-blogging. Because its so easy that I can do it whereever I am via SMS, I twitter more often than I write blog posts (= more content for my blog via the twitter-widget)

#3: Evan does what he is passionate about and EATS ITS OWN DOGFOOD (= one important success factor of both twitter and blogger.com)

#4: I am definitely no early adopter (since I started blogging in august 2006 and twittering in april 2007). I have to be convinced and see real value before I try something new. Thats an interesting personal insight :-).

Example of twitter power-usage:

Robert Scoble asked his 2500+ twitter-friends what tools he should install on his new MacBookPro. The 2500+ friends received an SMS/IM/RSS-alert with this question and sent Robert dozens of tips in just a couple of minutes. Thats value!

PS: I’m sure you already saw my twitter-widget in my sidebar :-).