
Why Twitter is underhyped and is probably worth five to 10 billion dollars - raghus
http://scobleizer.posterous.com/why-twitter-is-underhyped-and-is-probably-wor
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rscott
Absurd. I love how he randomly throws out a ridiculous number, $5-10 billion,
but never breaks down the justification numerically.

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tptacek
Who _is_ this guy, and why do we keep listening to him? Really? Who the hell
is he?

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patio11
He's famous for being famous which, if you think about it, means he is a
_perfect_ match for Twitter.

In more ways than one.

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tptacek
I use Twitter for all sorts of stuff. It's been awesome for me. I filled up a
cryptography class I wanted to give, I ran 2 different surveys, I crowdsourced
the content for a poster, I've started innumerable conversations on things,
I've directed people to blog posts I wanted to highlight, and I've got 3
months of marketing plans that all hinge on getting the word out over Twitter.

Twitter is useful.

Now, can someone explain how Scoble is useful? Because again I don't know why
the hell we've _ever_ listened to him.

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foenix
I'm curious, do you know about <http://identi.ca> ? If so, why would you
consider Twitter to be more advantageous?

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tptacek
Nope. Don't know anything about it. I use Twitter because my Twitter network
is large enough to do cool things with.

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jwesley
Well, now that FriendFeed is a lame duck he has to have something to rave
about. This is textbook Scoble. How he ever became "a thought leader" is
beyond me.

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nsfx
"The experiences I'm having with business owners in every city makes me
understand some things:

....

2\. Twitter is underhyped. I'm now convinced that Twitter has locked up a
whole raft of businesses and that Twitter is actually worth five to 10 billion
dollars.

....

Anyway, this all leads me to understand that Twitter is way underhyped and is
worth more in the marketplace than anyone has estimated yet."

So the author "understands" that Twitter is underhyped because, citing item
number 2, "Twitter is underhyped." What kind of silly argumentation is this?

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sirech
yeah, I think that what the world really needs is more hype about twitter...

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ivankirigin
I think a lot of his points are somewhat true, but he is a bad judge of
degree, and a worse judge of valuation. I'd bet money that if they raised
another round it would be valued at far less than $5B.

That kind of number is incompetant from a journalistic perspective because it
will never be openly validated.

I fucking hate that pundits can bloviate without consequence to their
reputation.

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srwh
Beyond the hype, Twitter is significant because you can crawl their complete
social network graph of millions of users. Delicious et al offers a similar
crawling but they don't have the same user base, and facebook doesn't permit
to do this.

Why it's important? from a business perspective you can quickly analyze the
customer sector of companies: look at dell followers, compare it to the apple
ones, what's the difference? (don't know if apple is on Twitter so take this
as an example)

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patio11
And this tells you _what_ , exactly? How does knowing which social marketers,
spam bots, and celebrities a nonrandom sampling of 50,000 technically inclined
hipsters follow help me sell computers to them?

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p01nd3xt3r
The deification of twitter continues.

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pavs
He is Michael Arrington's best buddy, so its only fitting that he
sensationalize things and pull numbers out of his ass.

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hamidp
There's no answer to the "why" in the article beyond celebrity mentions and
saying that businesses will pay.

A valuation of $5 billion would mean about $200 per user at the 25 million
users mark, which would be reasonable were it a porn-site with paying members.
But it's not, it's Twitter.

