Agreed. User base in a internet facing app means something when users visit the site to interact. Twitter is such an open platform for communication (like email, sms, and hell, even the web) that monetizing it as a service seems impossible.
I would venture to guess that based on revenue Tweetie is more valuable that Twitter itself. Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, they all have pageviews.
Twitter was founded as an SMS service and won't ever be able to fully monetize the platform unless they close the API (which they won't).
Agree 100%. IMHO the biggest mistake Twitter made was allowing others to control the client people use to post tweets. The majority of people are using 3rd party clients over which Twitter have no control.
To them, twitter are just a backend message passing system.
Monetizing a backend message system is orders of magnitude harder than monetizing a client which actually has eyeballs.
I would venture to guess that based on revenue Tweetie is more valuable that Twitter itself. Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, they all have pageviews.
Twitter was founded as an SMS service and won't ever be able to fully monetize the platform unless they close the API (which they won't).