

Twitter May Be Profitable. No, Seriously - dabent
http://gigaom.com/2009/12/21/twitter-maybe-profitable-no-seriously/

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felipe
Twitter cannot afford to be just profitable. The amount of money already
invested on Twitter requires it to be out-of-the-charts wildly profitable.
That's the key issue.

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tokenadult
_The amount of money already invested on Twitter requires it to be out-of-the-
charts wildly profitable._

How does Facebook compare in this regard?

~~~
wmf
Facebook needs revenue like the GDP of a small country to succeed.

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jsm386
As the revenues are dependent on search deals with Microsoft and Google,
predictions like this one from an expert such as Rand Fishkin would have
serious implications if borne out:

 _This Real-Time Search Thing is Outta Here

Microsoft initially beat Google to the punch in announcing their integration
with Twitter data in their SERPs. And in response, last Monday, Google
released what is, in my opinion, an early test version of Twitter integration
that's nowhere near ready for prime-time. Google has a history of jumping the
gun to prevent other companies from stealing the press narrative, but in this
case, I think it's seriously damaging (and nearly everyone, consumer or search
enthusiast, agrees) their usability and relevance.

This is, in my estimation (and many others), the worst implementation of new
results Google's ever implemented. I imagine the clickthrough and abandonment
stats have their usability folks up in arms already..._

<http://www.seomoz.org/blog/8-predictions-for-seo-in-2010>

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Maciek416
Given all the speculation about "spending lavishly" on C-level executives and
other such stuff, I wonder how much longer Twitter engineers can expect the
soda to be free for? ;)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750>

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idlewords
When I worked at the Twitter offices, the real free perk was expensive Belgian
beer. The dynamic was this - the service would go down, the devs would work to
bring it back up again, and then some grateful and wealthy Twitter user in the
valley would send over some fancy beer as a thank you.

I often wondered if this was creating perverse incentives, but I sure liked
that fancy beer.

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acl
maybe != may be. No, seriously.

~~~
lanstein
was going to crack that three spelling/grammatical mistakes/omissions in five
words is pretty impressive :)

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JoelMcCracken
It took me a while to understand the title because of the mistakes.

Poor grammar makes you hard to understand.

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robk
I hope they don't splash out on "C-Level executives" frankly. Dick Costolo is
pretty strong as COO material and I don't think Ev needs to go anywhere. This
is like saying Google needed to add C-Level execs in 2002.

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jsm386
link to the source:
[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a1jw...](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a1jwVtGQmErk&pos=13)

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dotcoma
Twitter may be profitable (in some distant future or in some far-away
universe)

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dotcoma
all right, all right, kool-aid drinkers! ;-)

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jrockway
The article cites a few more facts than you do. Sure, maybe Google and MS pay
less than 35 million combined, and maybe their operating costs are more than
25 million. If so, then they aren't profitable. But if those numbers are
right, then they are profitable, plain and simple.

So the article is not just kool-aid drinking.

~~~
dotcoma
that's not like being _really_ profitable. In the future, twitter may be (two
words) profitable. but I doubt it.

