Will Twitter fail, or fail to make profits?
Twitter has some scaling issues we all know that, but its addictive. Twitter also has a blog, new offices and new funders in the form of Jeff Bizos (Bizos Expeditions) and Bijan Sabet (Spark Capital) not to mention Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage. So its all happening over at Twitter HQ.
The stated strategy is to “become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model”. Thank goodness for that, capitalism aint dead, profits are king.
But, the profits will have to wait. Twitter believes “our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust”. All from the Twitter Blog.
Well Twitter is not reliable and not yet robust, but I believe there is much effort in process to get this right. So assuming we have a reliable and robust product, whats next.
Looking at the Twitter top100 90% are based in the United States (US), 2 we were unable to determine, 1 was from Europe, 4 from the United Kingdom (UK), 2 from Australia and 1 from Mars. Who knew? So we have a global userbase already, even though it is skewed to the US. But then we would expect that, given the size and military might of the US.
By all accounts growth is exponential, just look at Twitterfacts. Twitter facts was updated in February 2008 and states that users are expected to reach 1 million by April 2008. Twitdir etimates current users around 2,1m although no date is given. On review of the top100, Mars Phoenix was the 14,693,823th thing to sign up for Twitter and that was fairly recent. In fact the first post was 13th may 2008. So 28,125 followers in 2 months, not bad. No stats were available on active users at the time of writing.
Will Twitter ever become a Global Communications Platform?
Currently the profile of users across Twitter seems stacked towards a Twiteratti, mostly with their own shows or ways of promoting their Twitter feeds, for example Leo Laporte via TWIT, Cali Lewis on Geekbrief TV and Jason Calicanis on just about anything he can find. Great, they have the numbers and the platform. In fact around 10% of the people on Twitter appear to be following the Twitteratti, when they make up less than 0.001% of the twitter population, based on the top 100 and signups of around 15m. This is even more if you factor in accounts that are dormant which seem significant.
Most of the Twitteratti use Twitter as a means of promotion, look at TheRealDvorak, and Jason Calicanis to mention a few. These guys have to be respected, they have built an audience, maybe 75% of their posts are not related to their own sites but the rest drive traffic to an article or whatever. Lets be clear, there is no issue here, just the fact that may be more a way of rapid updates and interactive news from niche sources than a communications platform. These guys also work hard for their audience at an average of around 2,205 tweets per person normalised and around 15,244 followers each. Or maybe not if you consider madrid, the top updater who has made 322,230 tweets to date, and Im sure counting.
