

Twitter Isn't What You Think It Is - roachsocal
http://blog.scottrocher.com/post/442815250/twitter-isnt-what-you-think-it-is

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cantastoria
I can't see Twitter surviving if their long term strategy is to sell firehouse
access to their competitors. Relying on your competitors to keep in business
is a bad business plan to say the least.

The way I see it they're pretty much screwed. They're going to have to start
looking at different ways to monetize and they don't have many choices.
Injecting adds into everyone's Twitter stream will mean a drop in users for
sure plus it will contaminate the firehose. Relying on smaller developers to
pay for API access probably isn't going to generate enough revenue especially
if other options are available from Google et al. Once again, Google will
destroy yet another marker with free...

Of course one also has to wonder if Twitter isn't just a "pet rock" that will
run out steam on it's own.

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roachsocal
I think they should take their tagline (What's Happening Now) to the extreme
and start to mine the content being shared through The Platform, present it in
interesting ways, and sell ads on those pages. Like a crowd-sourced Yahoo.

Another way to make money could be to sell hyper-local ads on their search
engine, which should have a high conversion rate if they know your geolocation
at the time of search.

~~~
moe
_start to mine the content being shared through The Platform, present it in
interesting ways, and sell ads on those pages._

Sounds like a great idea to me. Just wonder who's gonna get that right first.
The search engine company, or the company struggling to keep the failwhale
away from a trivial messaging app...

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dasil003
_Debates about how ‘Twitter is this’ and ‘Twitter is that’ have become an
almost-daily spiel for us internet folks._

This was true 2-3 years ago. Most of us "internet folks" have since moved onto
more interesting frontiers. The conclusion that Twitter's real value is the
open API is something that I heard at every conference I went to in 2007. It
was sort of a novel idea when there were still relatively few open APIs,
mashups were new, and before Facebook launched their platform. Sure Twitter
still drives pageviews for silicon valley rags like TC, but there's not much
interesting to say about them anymore.

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dpcan
About a point he makes later in the post, is it "confirmed" that Twitter is
getting paid by Google/MS/Yahoo for the Firehose? It seems reasonable, but
it's still just rumor isn't it?

