good call steve, when i think of hugely successful money making endeavors, the first thing that comes to mind is the friggin’ post office.

i’m sure twitter will be all over this like a toolbag on an astronaut.

you should take a page from the twitter playbook and limit your brain pukes about twitter and friendfeed to 140 characters. (129)

Maybe it’s just me, but I still didn’t see how that relates to $$.

In other words, Twitter should buy FriendFeed.

hrm??

guys come on if twitter wants to make money it just needs to start sticking some fucking advertising all over it’s pages see?

Sorry, but I *really* don’t get the jiujitsu reference. I train in JJ and use Twitter, so not really sure where that analogy stems from. Is Twitter in a proverbial triangle choke or something?

As in using your opponent’s force against them, Jesse.

That’s Aikido not Jujutsu and certainly not Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Your ninja-like skill in mixing broken metaphors into these poorly-reasoned, rambling essays is noted however.

twitter will never make money… just a web2.0 good project with no future….

Actually, Steve’s use of jujitsu is very appropriate. As I’m sure you know, MeanGuy, Aikido and Jujutsu (and even Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) are all derivations of the same family of Japanese martial arts (sometimes categorized as grappling). In both Aikido and Jujustsu (and also Judo), using the energy of your opponent against himself is a central theme, hence the meaning of Aikido (the way of harmonizing energy), Jujustsu (the way of yielding) and Judo (the way of softness).

I thought Steve’s article was well written and insightful.

[...] VIEW ORIGINAL ARTICLE [...]

Dave Winer: Twitter can’t afford to buy FriendFeed. FriendFeed’s value is in its superstar team. Remember of the 13 people who work there, one ran the Gmail team. One ran the Google Talk team. Another ran the Google Maps team. And yet another was the designer for Google Maps, Calendar, Reader, Mail, and others. This is a superstar team that will not be taken off the street for less than hundreds of millions of dollars.

I see how this makes Twitter better for YOU but not better for Twitter.

Twitter has done exceptionally well against the clones and other messaging systems. FriendFeed, the company you think they should buy is working with just under 700k uniques for 10/08, while Twitter is approaching 4 million.

you’re starting to sound like a broken record about Twitter.

The post office analogy wasn’t that bad, actually. It’s been around for ages, and EVERYBODY uses it. Of course, it doesn’t answer the financial part of it.
As for Twitter buying up other companies, or integrating more features, NO. They’re best at simplicity. The network speaks for itself.

Wonder how much traffic this is getting from Twitter right now.

If you’re counting referrers, I dropped in from Friendfeed.

Very true, it’s the simplicity that’s makes it so great. Good point!

Oh btw
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.. and I just followed Bernie, after reading Rob Blatt on Twitter. Why this false paradigm of superiority? I might read different journalists writing much the same article in several different newspapers, if I’m interested – they will all have a slightly different take and that’s how I build up a picture. I don’t *want* them all to be the same.

Scoble, I guess I’ll just keep using FriendFeed then and admire them for their enormous star power.

I would like for FriendFeed to be able to import my contacts/follow list. The imaginary friends feature is nice but too much work to manually create a link to each person I follow on Twitter.

If you ask me I would like to be able to plug the Twitter stream right into FF and be able to track all the services I have plugged into FF. Jumping back and forth between Twitter and FF can get annoying. I want my node to be in one place.

It will be interesting to see where Twitter goes from here after there move of bringing Rael Dornfest on board. We seem to be having a race between Twitter opening up and the eventuality of FF offering it’s own Twitter-like services built in.

The competition ultimately benefits the user. So good for us.

[...] here:  A Whale of an Opportunity Posted by JapanServiced Office : 25/11/08 7:05 AM Post in ServicedOffice | « Japanese [...]

interesting..
I reckon it’s an open contest until someone starts to allow you to easily manipulate your social graph, independently from your messaging medium.. once you’ve organised your social graph, properly, then you’ll probably not want to use any service, that doesn’t let you just import, or export back into it..
in terms of revenue, the values got to come from something other than straight forward advertising – that model’s been done to death, and now we need something way more targetted and relevant, to draw any real utility, and value to the users.

I think more than just ads Twitter has a lot more to generate revenue from. Twitter exactly knows what it’s people like. they should be offering this data to Adwords via API’s and so that Adwords (or anyone who can pay a good amount) can serve highly relevant ads.

Very substantive strategic analysis. What are the arguments, if any, for Twitter to stay closed?

This post makes some interesting comments regarding Twitter’s replacement of email as a communication method, but I think strays a bit in leaping to the “post office” analogy. And the line “Executives can manage by starting fires and watching to see who puts them out” is just crazy. That’s not a strategy or management method, that’s arson.

Though this idea doesn’t quite find the revenue, it is definitely a necessary step for Twitter. You said it best with “Twitter can use its market muscle to stay ahead of attempts to clone it from below or above.” Twitter is going to see pressure soon enough and it needs to have more weight to stay above water.

I don’t think these services have much choice but to become more and more open. If they don’t do it someone else will.

As far as social graphs are concerned, I would say people will use these services more if they have everything organized the way they want it.

Too much energy is expended in tweaking, organizing and troubleshooting instead of just using them. At that point people can focus on their content and not the underlying framework so much.

Steve, another gem of an essay. Well done! Your concise prose and crystal-clear logic never fail to penetrate through the “cloud” of bad Internet writing.

(Just kidding, of course. How many thousands of interminable and incoherent Twitter treatises are you going to post? You are the fail-whale of authors.)

After reading each of these comments up to now, the bottom line appears to be that Twitter has some good options in front. Will there be a more opportune time to grab even more success by the throat than now for Twitter? I say choose now, don’t wait any longer because if I hear another word about how Twitter can do such and such and such I’m gonna scream. lol

Jesus….. Evan – just give Steve his track please.

[...] Update: Steve also has a nice pulpit at TechCrunchIT. [...]

Yes the twitter is too smarty to post what your thinks and looks. Now the ad can show beside the micro blog.

I just opened my first Twitter account and I cannot wait to use it to it’s full potential! To date Twitter has done nothing but impress and do well and I’m excited to see how they choose to monetize their service. Think Outside The Box!

[...] an article on Business Week, took examples of other microblogging services, and the second, on TechCrunchIT, wtites about how Twitter can become the single post office of the variety of services that we use [...]

[...] path to becoming a personal and professional productivity application. TechCrunch wrote about how Twitter should become the leader in cross-platform micromessaging (Myspace + Friendfeed + Facebook, etc). There’s also always the option to focus on increasing [...]

Exactly my point, twitter can end up being an interaction channel to a variety of cloud based services!

I have blogged about it recently.

http://maheshcr.com/blog/2008/10/22/twitter-as-command-line-to-the-clouds/

i have been trying to figure out the business plan of twitter and trust me I have no clue though despite their great services how long they will be able to last god bless twitter.

[...] an article on Business Week, took examples of other microblogging services, and the second, on TechCrunchIT, wtites about how Twitter can become the single post office of the variety of services that we use [...]

The business plan of twitter is to attract as many visitors and sell on as an advertising package.

I really like twitter and have many visitors come across my website directly from twitter, BIG UP Twitter

Come on guys, twitter is very rewarding, it helps me catch up on seo news with seo consultants around the world.

licious.90@gmail.com