There are thousands of apps built on top of Twitter, but are any of them a true killer app that could give rise to an entirely new sub-industry? Venture capitalist, and Twitter investor, Fred Wilson doesn’t think so. While Twitter desktop clients, mobile apps, photo uploading services, and URL shorteners have all made Twitter what it is today, he points out:
Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product.
Wilson is still waiting for the equivalent of the desktop publishing startups which defined the early Mac computer or Lotus Notes for the PC. The time for filling holes is over, he suggests. Twitter is now big enough for some killer apps to emerge and create entire new businesses.
Wilson rattles off some obvious (to him) opportunities to create new Twitter startups around social gaming, verticals like finance and movies, enterprise apps, information discovery, and analytics. Of course, many startups are already tackling some of these areas, which is why Wilson thinks the real killer apps will be less obvious until they hit us.
What will those killer apps be?
Fred Wilson is a founder and Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures. Fred began his career in venture capital in 1987 and he has focused exclusively on information technology investments for the past 16 years. From 1987 to 1996, Fred was first an Associate and then a General Partner at Euclid Partners, an early stage venture capital firm located in New York City. In 1996, Fred co-founded Flatiron Partners. Fred was the Managing Partner of Flatiron Partners and was responsible...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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