The Great Twitter Gravy Train
Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge dive into the fetid and yet compelling pool of microblogging loveliness and celebrity that is Twitter. If Twitter defines the social media bubble, what does that mean for you and me, to say nothing of Ashton Kitchen or whatever his name is? Where’s the money coming from? And who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes? Find out in Shot of Jaq!
66 Comments to “The Great Twitter Gravy Train”
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Anyone who follows me on Twitter or Identica knows that I use it mainly to grumble and grump about, and I’ve managed to build myself a microblogging persona as a miserable, misanthropic gitoid, which in real life I’m really not (except for in the morning).
But the trouble is that because you’ve only got 140 characters in which to express yourself you very easily give people the impression of thinking you’re someone you’re not (or that you hold opinions that you don’t or whatever), especially if you’re someone like me who wants to write something witty and apposite with every update (and people will tell you that that’s how I speak in real life, too; it’s grandstanding and annoying but I think it might be genetic).
The other problem with microblogging is that whilst it creates a great place to start debates it’s an awful place to actually have debates. You can’t express yourself fully in 140 characters, and this leads to you wanting to punch people in the face after a round of tweeting (for example, the recent arguments about the GIMP being left out of Ubuntu’s default install got me really pissed off because you can’t knock sense into someone in 140 characters).
If you can’t express yourself in 140, you’re not trying hard enough. If you still can’t, don’t do it on Twitter. Using a hammer to drive a screw pisses off you and the screw.
Where does the money come from?
For facebook, at least, not from shiny badges, but from advertising.
gmb: there wasn’t anywhere that was a great place to start debates beforehand, though. What I think people don’t yet have a handle on is when a Twitter discussion should instead move to some more considered blog posts, which is something that I expect will evolve over time…
Mez: where does that leave someone else, though? I mean, can Identi.ca build a viable business by using advertising? Twitter has hardly any…
I suspect that the money will come from the analysis that Twitter can do on the streams they have. Though there is an open API on Twitter at the moment, they can access the data more quickly and better than anyone else. Pay them enough and I’m sure they can identify all the users that have ever expressed an interest in your product and you can contact them. Or a more advanced version of trending topics as an additional feed into your traders on the stock market floor.
The most valuable asset that twitter has is the information that is put in there by the users (like Facebook and MySpace) and the fact that it is all aggregated to a single space and this is likely where the profit could come from.
The problem is that Twitter has a few different types of users:
‘Status’ people – they use Twitter like (and sometimes even as) a facebook status.
‘Microblog’ people – they use Twitter like an uncommented blog, but shorter
‘Discussion’ people – they really want a normal blog, with comments and stuff, and try to use it as such.
All 3 do work (in some ways), but it gets complicated when you have people doing all 3.
mrben: so do you think that changes need to be made to accommodate those use cases?
I think that it would probably be better for blog engines to embrace Twitter so that people can actually have the best of both worlds without denying those who don’t want those functions.
I think twitter got a big fat revenue when they made their search deals with google and bing didn’t they? Also there have been subtle adverts on there for twitter services for a while. I think the “they have no way of making money” thing is no longer true.
draxil: what search deals?
@sil
http://mashable.com/2009/10/21/google-twitter-search-deal/
http://mashable.com/2009/10/21/bing-facebook-twitter/
draxil: wtf? Google pay money to add Twitter to search results? Now, Shot of Jaq is in the Google search results too: where’s our money?
You know, neither I nor anyone I know uses or cares about twitter. I don’t think I should feel I’m missing something…
…and that is fine.
However, millions of people who use it see it as otherwise. I don’t believe we need to turn Twitter into the topic of a thesis, but we can’t ignore its rabid success and impact on how we communicate with each other.
@sil it doesn’t appear in the same way it’s a special “real time results” thing on google (or will be) and I think bing just do a special twitter search.
I’d imagine most of the money is going to come from analyzing tweets for opinions on products and brands, such as a retweet about a new product being offered or a mini review on a product that a user is playing around with, or an opinion on what bonuses a bank is paying out etc…
basically trying to measuring ‘buzz’, i.e. stuff that rises up above the normal white noise of what people had for breakfast etc
RT @TechCrunch: Twitter Japan To Introduce Paid Premium Accounts Next January http://bit.ly/6r4Gc5 by @robinwauters
I think that the main lasting impact of twitter, at least for people here in the States, is going to be the use of SMS/texts to update it. For a long time over here, we’ve called people far more than we’ve texted them, which is basically the opposite of how the rest of the world does it. On Digital Planet they showcased how people in Africa are doing simple banking procedures through texts.
But none of that happens here in the States. Two years ago, my girlfriend, who didn’t text at the time, said she didn’t see the point of texting and would never use it; now that she has a phone that has a QWERTY keyboard, she does it all the time. Now, smartphones may replace this by just allowing people to go straight to the websites; but a lot of people cannot afford the smartphone and, especially, the data plan. So I think more texting friendly services are going to start popping up.
Personally, I think twitter will die like MySpace before any sizable return on investment is made. Maybe… maybe not.
Anyway, is there a chance we could have a 9 minutes a shot next time. I was just getting into it.
EDIT to above post: Anyway, ist there a chance we could have MORE than 9 minutes a shot next time. I was just getting into it.
9 minutes a shot is enough just like 140 characters is…Shots are to tech podcasts like what tweets are to blog entries…
benuski: that’s interesting. I would have thought that the US policy of the recipient paying for some of a text would have encouraged more use, not less! Why’s that, then?
jkt: the idea that Twitter’s data worthy of mining is “what’s hot” dovetails quite neatly with t0m’s idea above that Twitter’s mining-worthy data is the people who use it. Presumably both would work.
From my tweet
“interesting that #shotofjaq criticize twitter for being a company that doesnt make profit especially when you consider who they work for :-/”
How is it different to having a benevolent billionaire proping up your companys losses?
Ade: the criticism was more around: how do Twitter ever plan to make money? We don’t get it. Some possible answers have been mentioned above (charging for “Twitter Pro” accounts, being paid by search engines for close integration of Twitter tweets into search, selling access to data-mine their databases). Canonical has a defined set of revenue streams. That’s the difference.
that may be the case but when Mark started out he had no clue, he just decided to build a great product and worry about the rest later.
He isnt alone is this – Google did, arguably, the exact same thing when they launched their search engine. Its not an unusual business model these days.
VCs propping up the company vs personal wealth propping up the company – whats the difference other than VCs make lots of these investments hoping that when one of them hits the big time, it will wipe out the losses of the others.
Interesting debate and all that
I don’t think Mark started out with no clue. I think he knew that you need to built a great product and ubiquity of that product first, and then you can plug in all these other service. I am not sure whether he had a roadmap for what those specific services would be, outside of the usual tech support, training etc.
Im just saying that criticizing a company that has built a very popular product but that still doesnt make a profit seems a little ironic all things considered
That’s a perfectly reasonable point. I don’t know whether Mark Shuttleworth had the whole plan mapped out in his head on day one, but it’s reasonable at least to say that maybe the Twitter team just tried to build a great product and hoped that they’d come up with ways to monetise it later. However, that’s what we were talking about: we’re now quite a few years in and it’s still entirely unclear what the Twitter business plan is. Is the other shoe about to drop?
sil: I’m not sure why Americans have been so adverse to texting; maybe it has something to do with our instant gratification culture? But until the last three or so years, texting, even among young people, wasn’t that high. And outside of people under 30, its still pretty limited.
This is true, most adults consider txt’ing to be a thing the kids do.
It was interesting the amount of pagers still in use in the US, weird!
Pagers? What is this, the Middle Ages?
http://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html
1/2 a million pager intercepts during 911 – some are automated system messages but loads are personal messages – I had no idea that the US still use pagers so much
Actually, this is a better link
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/a7xpt/conspiracy_theories_commence_wikileaks_to_release/
Sorry if off topic
I agree with jkt and t0m that Twitter will be used for searching for trends and opinions, but I think the real challenge will be separating the wheat from the chaff. A news report once said 40% of twitter traffic was drivel – I can’t imagine how it’s not double that, frankly, so first of all only a few tweets are actually useful. Secondly doing the natural language processing on the human-comprehensible but appalling sentences and phrases people write in tweets is a massive technical challenge.
Very interested to see where this goes and whether they’ll move to pay-for accounts across the board. I use twitter a great deal but if they start charging for it I won’t have any interest at all. In fact, I’ll probably get more done.
Actually, one of the things I’m most interested in is how a lot of these new instant-gratification technologies (I’m thinking twitter & facebook primarily) will affect how people work and think, especially with regard to attention and attention spans. But I’m wandering from the point.
In short, I’m buggered if I know how twitter will raise $150+M, and I’m wondering if they’re in the same position.
)
Great shot, btw, guys, and Aq’s audio is now perfect.
I wonder if twitter will start going add supported. The ad supported model has worked for broadcast television, many other web sites, and now some phone apps.
I was under the impression that ads are losing their effectiveness online now. I believe Facebook tried ads as a revenue model and they have struggled.
I think microblogging should have the same setup as blogging: totally decentralized; no walled gardens liked Twitter (but the availability of hosted services for those who don’t want to roll their own). You have a ‘tweet reader’, same as RSS reader. The individual is entirely in control of the whole shebang — their posted tweets, who they follow. You get the whole pubsub/asymmetric follow thing going on.
Basically microblogging should do exactly what it says on the tin… same infrastructure as blogging, but mini-style.
identi.ca doesn’t seem quite to offer that… more the facility to easily create your own walled garden.
It should all be open. I think that all that Twitter should really amount to is ‘the company that popularised microblogging’.
I believe that Statusnet (Identica) actually has a business plan based on private deployments inside large organisations (companies, governments, etc.) and they have actual installations like that. That is one of the reasons that you can have your own server. The main identi.ca service is acting as a form of advertisement for the actual business that is intended to make money.
For private installations, I think that this sort of thing is good for replacing e-mail where you just want to send a brief status or update message. The 140 character limit is not a problem in these sorts of applications. In fact I would bet that a lot of managers would happy to pay extra to keep status update messages from their employees down to 140 characters.
What I suspect will happen in the long run though is that micro-blogging features will get folded into other more general packages, and the dedicated micro-bloggins systems will either fade away or become part of those more general purpose systems.
Not to beat a dead horse, I could never see the use of Twitter until I started using it a month ago, already I can see the point in it, I love factoids, NASA shuttle landing…Storm brewing in NW….Moonlanding tapedrives for sale, all this kind of makes my day. Yes I know, saaad little geek, but hey, thats what I am.
Got this link on my Twitter feeds this morning, about Twitter planning to charge for some tweets:
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/twitter-to-charge-for-reading-tweets-next-year-654608?src=rss&attr=newsintern
of course the other side of the coin is, that by subscribing to so many social sites, facebook/twitter/identica/blah blah blah, I sometimes lose track of conversations, i’ve responded so many times with the incorrect answer, that I think my friends think I have a brain problem.
I might be wrong on this, but don’t Twitter make money from deals with Mobile phone carriers? You said about how they want to see themselves as a service that other people plug into, and if I were a phone company It wouldn’t take a lot to convince me that access to Twitter through my phones (by short SMS numbers etc) was a service my customers, and therefore I, would be willing to pay for.
I looked into that. I suspect they do, but it’s not pyblically discussed, so we didn’t talk about it. There’s the notion of phones being advertised as “with free Twitter access” in the UK (although Facebook is the headline normally) so perhaps they score cash from that.
[...] we kicked out our first proper episode of Shot Of Jaq and I am chuffed to bits with the response. Right now it stands at 42 comments, and I am sure this [...]
Maybe Twitter is trying to grow to the point where it becomes “too big to fail” then they can be bailed out by the the US.gov
My guess would be that they will try lots of ways to make money and they will keep the ones that work and quietly ditch the ones that don’t. An Internet company with only one way to make money is like a manufacturer with only one customer. Once that revenue stream dries up then your bum is out the window.
If I were Twitter I would be looking in to all the ideas above and more.
there is a long tail effect going on. First if you wanted to write to the world you had to be a journalist or write a book or something. Not many people did that as you had to be good at it. Then came the internet and blogging. Now many many more people could have a blog and write stuff they wanted to write about to the world. Then came microblogging. All those not articulate enough to write a full blog article could now join in – another barrier fell. The logical extension of this trend is pokebook http://www.pokebook.co.uk/ where you don’t even have to be capable of forming a coherent message of 140 characters or less, all you can do is poke people.
In France, a company that handles structural services like water, electricity transport, gas, phone … is usually a public service ran by the State and paid by public taxes. Would Twitter be in this case ? As it was said earlier money is node made by twitter itself but by applications built on top of it. Can we imagine G20 tax that would buy twitter and pay for structural services such as some twitter/identica open source gathering ? (sorry for the poor english, hope you got the main lines)
Great first episode. Regarding the follow-up conversation technology, though, would you consider increasing the number of comments included in the feed to accommodate people who have feed readers that automatically display comments along with the item? With only ten included a lot of comments fly by in the feed update interval.
Kurt: there should now be 25 comments in the feed, I think!
Thanks!
I think they will make money by selling all the statistics to companies looking for trends etc. There is an awful lot of information in the twitter feed if you get some decent statiticians onto it.
Twitter, for me, just seems to be so much white noise. Pointless sound created by “look at me” types. I really don’t have the time for it. So much of the social networking that I have looked at is just a substitute for real writing and authentic communication. If twitter went away in the next moment I would not notice.
(Sorry for the bad English.)
I liked the episode and I’m sure that the future is going to be brilliant. But there were a couple of things I didn’t like.
First, the background music when Jono was reading the introduction was too loud for my taste.
Second, Jono and Aq have said that they planned to make shotof aq more serious and better researched than Lugradio. They did. In fact, Shot of Jaq sounded more professional but PC World professional. Frankly I was a little bit disapointed, I expected a discussion from the open source/free software community point of view, instead of trying to imagine how the VC were going to get their investement back.
Anyway, it was a good work, and I’m sure that next episodes will be much better.
Other than wanting Twitter to open all their source and not charge for their service, I’m not sure there’s much more that the open source community might want from Twitter. Would that be right, Jono, Aq?
Twitter is a free service already, which is a good start but I’m sure RMS would demand more.
The more I think about it the more likely it’ll be selling trend info en masse and being too big to fail, once other commercial services start to rely on it.
[...] we kicked out our first proper episode of Shot Of Jaq and I am chuffed to bits with the response. Right now it stands at 42 comments, and I am sure this [...]
As far as the money, Twitter already makes money in Japan. I can’t find the link at the moment, but Twitter has some deals where they get a cut from the cell phone service providers of each text that is sent. As texting is HUGE in Japan, it’s a decent revenue model.
Similarly, Orange UK announced that they were going to offer MMS access to Twitter allowing users to upload photos that they take using there phones and their standard MMS interfaces (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/11/another-first-in-uk.html).
Again, twitter will take a cut of the cost of each of these sent.
SMS and MMS traffic is a huge market worldwide. It is in the service providers best interest to provide access to services like Twitter that will encourage their users to send as many messages as possible and potentially go over their allotted message pool. That will force them to upgrade their plans or consistently pay overage charges.
Now, is that enough money and are there other ways they can make more money? I’m not sure.
Beyond that, Twitter has a lot of data to sell. I would love to see what sort of applications Twitter has written on the back end to parse the sh*t-ton of data they receive every day. I really think they are pulling a Google with this one. As Google’s Head of Research, Peter Norvig, is fond of demonstrating, with enough data many problems become shallow (spell checking/auto suggest/intention prediction, voice recognition, etc).
The interesting question is what tools is Twittering making that we’ll never see.
It’s pronounced cap-you-let not cap-you-lay.
It’s pronounced cap-you-let not cap-you-lay.
Twitter really is underwhelming to me. Of course the point could be made that that’s because no one wants to talk to me that badly. I can see the value in it but right now I couldn’t care less(although I do have a twitter account)
Sorry to say this and I am sure this has been said time an again. How can anyone think that they are so important that I need to know that they are at the store buying milk or going to the lieu. I certainly am not. Maybe I need to plugin more and stop reading hard copy.