Hey, Twitter..what are YOU doing?
It is already clear that Twitter is a vastly popular “micro-blogging” service, with over 3 million posts daily. What’s not clear is how it will ever turn a profit. In fact, the founder is really rather nonchalant about the matter much a la Jim Clark in the heyday of Netscape and Healtheon creations. Wired Magazine reports in a interview with co-founder Biz Stone:
“At this point, given that we have plenty of money in the bank, it makes a lot more sense not to distract ourselves with trying to put the finishing touches on a revenue plan,” says the 34-year-old Stone, who founded Twitter with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams in 2006.
Of course, Stone is aware that advertising is the most likely route to immediate commercial viability:
“At this point, given that we have plenty of money in the bank, it makes a lot more sense not to distract ourselves with trying to put the finishing touches on a revenue plan,” says the 34-year-old Stone, who founded Twitter with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams in 2006.
While generally I’m opposed to a business model that has no idea how it will ever make money, in this case I think Stone may be on the right track. The problem is that Twitter, an inherently on-the-go service , is ahead of its time with respect to the mobile web browsing habits of the population at large. The massive adoption rate of mobile web, however, is quickly correcting this–very quickly. Within a year most mobile phones will come with a data plan bundled in.
In the case of Twitter, companies that offer mobile websites (which has already become a basic customer expectation for many companies) should be more than willing to pay Twitter to harness its real-time data to create valuable information both on the desktop web and mobile web at the same time. If companies pay for traffic driven both directions, from their mobile sites out into tweets and as incoming traffic from other tweets, the annoying cluttered ad environment of the mobile internet as it stands could become obsolete.
The first step is of course, for the remaining web services providers and companies that have somehow not woken up to the times yet to get in gear and make sure that their web sites and services can be accessed from a wide range of mobile devices as soon as possible. The market will be different in less than a year, so there’s no time to waste.