

Reminder: Twitter was started in 2006 - rishi
http://gettingmoreawesome.blogspot.com/2009/09/reminder-twitter-was-started-in-2006.html

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patio11
I started my business in 2006, too.

Put it this way: if Twitter and I swapped sales numbers, we'd both be
failures.

Me: Dang, I lost a salary roughly equivalent to my day job. That means I have
to scale back plans for Christmas this year.

Twitter: AWW "#$& we have revenue! NOOOOO!

Me: ???

Twitter: Now our valuation will be in reference to the revenue instead of in
reference to the effectiveness of our PR machine!

Me: ???

Twitter: By the simple expedient of paying us real money you have wiped out
BILLIONS in imaginary wealth!

Me: ?????

~~~
iamelgringo
You're in completely different businesses, though. At this point, Twitter is a
medium (as in new form of media). They may change their business, at some
point, but right now, they have created a new broadcast medium, and they're
doing what all media people try to do. Get as many viewers as possible. That's
why they've had so much interest from other media companies and celebrities.
CNN and Ashton Kutcher don't really understand software as a service. You're
in a software as a service business.

Being technologists, I think that we understand the software and technologies
quite well, but I think that it's easy for us to confuse the completely
separate businesses that are being built using those technologies.

100 years ago the blacksmiths like my grandfather became car mechanics. The
technologies both involved metal and fire, so the people that understood metal
and fire became the people that fixed the horseless carriage. There really
wasn't a mental divide for people involved in those businesses because the
technologies were so similar.

In another 20 years, I think the distinction between software as media and
software as a product ans software as a service is going to become a lot
clearer. Until then, we're going to have a lot of confusion about this.

~~~
axod
>> "they have created a new broadcast medium"

You're in PR right?

I still think the moment twitter try to turn on ads, they're doomed.
Monetizing twitter is extremely non-trivial IMHO, especially after providing
it completely free for so long.

Also for most people twitter is just the network their 3rd party twitter
client is using. Monetizing that is really hard.

~~~
shabda
> non-trivial IMHO

Non trivial != impossible.

~~~
shabda
(@ axod, reply link goes away after a while, so Ill reply here.) Sometimes
lack of innovation is also an innovation. The innovation has happened around
uses of twitter, apps of twitter, not twitter itself.

And think of it this way, FB has way more features than twitter, and yet
_they_ had to introduce features which twitter had, and are competing with it.

~~~
axod
>> " around uses of twitter, apps of twitter, not twitter itself."

eg things outside their control that they cannot monetize.

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tumult
So? I used Twitter in 2006. My tweets were like, "going to the store now." "In
line at the movie theater." etc. Literally, what are you doing right now? And
that's what other people used it for, too.

It was popular even in 2006 and 2007, by web app standards. Right now it's
ridiculously, explosively popular.

 _"It must have been hard to stay motivated, keep investors happy, and
innovate from 2006-2008ish."_

Just because _you_ didn't use Twitter in 2006 doesn't mean it was a wasteland.

~~~
borism
what innovation?

~~~
tumult
That too :)

------
suhail
<http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/>

~~~
riffer
In a similar vein, this is a comparison of 8 multi-person SMS services from
September 2006:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/27/a-look-at-eight-
multi-p...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/27/a-look-at-eight-multi-person-
sms-services/)

------
mixmax
It takes years to build an overnight success.

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cromulent
I think it might be hard to monetize it, because as soon as they add any
friction then perhaps competitive services will start up with the same API.

If someone else provided a twitter service, with the same API, then twitter
clients (including web clients) could easily be updated to subscribe to both.
Or any number of twitter services. Decentralized twitter. Is there any reason
why tweets need to go through a central hub?

~~~
edd
Competitive services have already been created. There have been attempts to do
it all: decentralise it, improve it, extend it to more characters, add video,
add photos. Especially during their bad points where they were down every 5
minutes due to load. Twitter has enough of a user base that its stupidly hard
for anyone to compete with it. The core system is "very simple", the user base
is what counts in this game.

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timcederman
So what was the tipping point? Celebrities?

~~~
forgotmypasswd
CNN and other news organizations reporting on tweets

