Tweeterism » News about Twitter

Twitter to Make Money from Tools and Not Ads

tweeterism — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:31:36 +0000

Twitter’s business model has been officially confirmed by co-founder Biz Stone, which has said that Twitter is developing add-on tools and services for businesses and professional users of Twitter. These premium tools will be introduced by the end of 2009.

But Stone dismissed the notion of selling advertisements on the popular service at this time, even though ad revenue is the main way most Web start-ups manage to stay in business while keeping their service free for consumers.

“There are a few reasons why we’re not pursuing advertising — one is it’s just not quite as interesting to us,” Stone told the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York via videolink from San Francisco.

Stone said serving up ads alongside Twitter messages could also annoy users. And he said Twitter doesn’t have, and isn’t seeking to hire, the staff to create an advertising-based business.

He also confirmed that Twitter will continue to remain free for all users and businesses and talked about Twitter’s plan to work with mobile networks:

The company’s main focus at the moment is developing new features for commercial users, such as “lightweight analytics” and a directory of commercial accounts that would verify that businesses on Twitter are legitimate.

He also said the company has had talks with cell phone carriers to make sure that Twitter works on their text messaging networks, and said it was possible Twitter could strike revenue-sharing agreements with some of the carriers. Twitter closed a round of financing earlier this year pegged at $35 million by media reports, and Stone said the company was not under any pressure by its investors to earn a profit in the near future.

Twitter Search Will Index and Rank Web Pages

tweeterism — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:02:48 +0000

Twitter is currently looking to crawl links included in tweets and index the content of these pages, which means that Twitter search will no longer just be a snapshot of a stream of tweets occuring in real-time.. but an archive of webpages that have been historically tweeted or mentioned by Twitter users.

This was mentioned by Santosh Jayaram, currently Twitter’s VP of Operations and formerly a the VP of search quality on Google. What’s interesting is that Twitter Search will develop a ‘reputation’ ranking system’:

When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

Jayaram did not say precisely how reputation will be calculated; he indicated that engineers are still figuring that out. But this, again, will make Twitter Search more valuable.

Currently, if you search for a hot topic on Twitter, the results may be swamped by re-tweets and low-value content from hundreds or thousands of other users. A ranking system will help a great deal.

Ashton Kutcher’s 1 Million Twitter Followers: Yes, its a PR Stunt.

tweeterism — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 08:30:36 +0000

As you should probably know by now, Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to reach 1 million Twitter followers. But he didn’t just do it with the web. Lamar, the third largest billboard company in the US donated 1,133 digital billboards advertising Kutcher’s Twitter profile. This amounts to 34 million impressions.

Some say it’s just a PR stunt to promote Twitter, CNN and even Oprah. I was never under the illusion that it was anything else but that. Come on, Kutcher is a celebrity. The whole deal about the race being an exercise in social media triumph over old media is not entirely accurate.

Not everyone is a celebrity, not everyone has a company putting up over a thousand billboards promoting your profile. Yes, everyone has a voice through social media but not every voice is amplified. Not everyone has a large audience.

But in the end, it’s always good for some charity to benefit from the result of PR campaigns like this. And if the fans were entertained, well they may have gotten what they wanted. I just think that the whole debacle was framed as a heroic triumph when its not that big a deal.

Having said that, it’s worth noting that this is the first time ever a Twitter profile was advertised in offline media, as least on such a prevalent basis.

Twitter Traffic Increases by 131% in March to 9.3 Million US Visitors

tweeterism — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:41:37 +0000

Comscore stats show that Twitter traffic has increased by 131% to reach 9.3 million US visitors. But what is more interesting is research which shows that Twitter users are 2 or 3 times more likely to visit top online news sites like Yahoo News, CNN and MSNBC than the average person.

For example, while 17 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience visited CNN.com in March, more than double that percentage (38 percent) of Twitter.com visitors did so. So these data firmly establish that there’s a strong relationship between Twitter users and news consumption.

Interview With Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey

tweeterism — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 02:05:05 +0000

The LA Times has a good two part interview with Jack Dorsey, one of the founding fathers of Twitter. There’s some choice bits here that’ll I’ll just highlight, go check the full article for more.

On choosing the name ‘Twitter‘:

We wanted to capture that feeling: the physical sensation that you’re buzzing your friend’s pocket. It’s like buzzing all over the world. So we did a bunch of name-storming, and we came up with the word “twitch,” because the phone kind of vibrates when it moves.

But “twitch” is not a good product name because it doesn’t bring up the right imagery. So we looked in the dictionary for words around it, and we came across the word “twitter,” and it was just perfect. The definition was “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.” And that’s exactly what the product was.

The whole bird thing: bird chirps sound meaningless to us, but meaning is applied by other birds. The same is true of Twitter: a lot of messages can be seen as completely useless and meaningless, but it’s entirely dependent on the recipient. So we just fell in love with the word.

On the evolution of Twitter so far:

Back in the day we thought, well, if we get to this many users or this level of relevancy in the mainstream, we’re going to have to add a bunch of features, and make this or that group of people happy… but that really hasn’t come to pass. The only substantial thing we’ve added to the service is search. Which is huge, but it doesn’t change the fundamental aspect of what Twitter is.

So the ability to have a service that really hasn’t changed and is still growing by leaps and bounds is astonishing to me because it’s like, wow, a simple concept like that — the essence of some communication pulled out from other mediums — really has wings on its own.

On following thousands of Twitter users:

I imagine that people follow a lot of people just to get a sense of, like, I’ve got a full room here, and I’ve got a lot of people that are giving wildly different opinions and updates — I’ll try them out for a time and if I don’t like what they say next, I can very easily leave them.

But like any other technology, we figure out what our relationship is to it. Some people want to go big right away and filter out, some people want to stay small and add people as they find them. And some people are constantly editing the balance between both. It’s just important that the technology allows for all of those approaches.

Twitter Significantly Reduces Downtime Since July 2008

tweeterism — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:49:03 +0000

While Twitter was king when it comes to downtime among social networks in 2008, it has gradually improved. 84% of Twitter’s downtime happened during the first half of 2008 while its availability has improved significantly in the second half of 08. Pingdom has a PDF report on social network downtime and it answers some good questions about why availability is crucial to a social site’s growth, especially for a real-time service like Twitter.

A Better Twitter Search Experience is Coming

tweeterism — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 02:58:54 +0000

Twitter news of the day. Better search integration to come. Biz at the official Twitter blog talks about testing a new interface which places search and trend features currently found on the Twitter Search page in the top corner of each profile. I’m just wondering… why only now? Many people have been clamoring for an easily accessible search bar on the same profile page and this would be a terrific addition. No more need for tools like Power Twitter anymore.

It will be interesting to see how else they plan to develop Twitter search beyond the basic change in interface usability.

Twitter Search has been growing ever more popular despite the fact that it lives on a subdomain of our site. Today, we’ve placed Search and Trends into the signed-in home pages of a limited set of accounts to get a better sense of how it works for folks before we release the feature completely into the wild. Most people will not see this test, just a small, random subset.

Profiling the People Who Use Twitter

tweeterism — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:19:48 +0000

While Twitter users span a large demographic, a good amount of them fall within a similar pattern: young adults. According to research from Pew Internet, the biggest Twitter user group are adults from 25 to 34 with many of them being mobile savvy.

Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

Twitter users and status updaters are also a mobile bunch; as a group they are much more likely to be using wireless technologies — laptops, handhelds and cell phones — for internet access, or cell phones for text messaging.

When compared to users of other online social media websites like Facebook and Myspace, Twitter has a more moderately adult audience:

As noted above, Twitter users are overwhelmingly young. However, unlike the majority of other applications with a similarly large percentage of youth, Twitter use is not dominated by the youngest of young adults. Indeed, the median age of a Twitter user is 31. In comparison, the median age of a MySpace user is 27, Facebook user is 26 and LinkedIn user is 40.

You can read the full report here (PDF).

Twitter May Start Charging Brands for Commercial Accounts

tweeterism — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:22:44 +0000

Maybe Twitter did pay attention to some of the ‘how-twitter-should-monetize’ ideas floating around the web. The co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone talks to Marketing Magazine on Twitter’s possible business model:

Co-founder Biz Stone told Marketing: ‘We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.’ He would not be drawn on the level of charges. Stone said it could also create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool.

What is interesting is the immediate response from some of the brands interviewed:

But Bob Pearson, vice-president of communities and conversations at Dell, said: ‘If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.’ Robin Grant, managing director of social media agency We Are Social, said Twitter could charge for display ads or to access customer information for marketing.

I mentioned the same hesitation earlier in my post about Twitter’s business model. Why would businesses pay a lot of money to market on Twitter when they can easily do so with a free account and the API? After all, Dell has already made $1 million and more from Twitter alone without specialized access. I think the commercial accounts would have to be carefully sold at a reasonable price plan with enough data-mining features in order for brands to really adopt them.

Update: Biz Stone talks a little more about monetization on the official Twitter blog:

We’ve been thinking out loud for more than a year about the growing use of Twitter by companies, brands, and other commercial organizations. It’s great that both individuals and organizations are finding value in Twitter and there may be ways we can enrich the experience. In fact, we hope to begin iterating on revenue products this year.

However, it’s important to note that whatever we come up with, Twitter will remain free to use by everyone—individuals, companies, celebrities, etc. What we’re thinking about is adding value in places where we are already seeing traction, not imposing fees on existing services. We are still very early in the idea stage and we don’t have anything to share just yet despite a recent surge in speculation. When we do, we’ll be sure to let you know.

Twitter breaks into the Top 100 websites in the UK

tweeterism — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:45:15 +0000

More irrefutable proof of Twitter’s continual growth and surge into the mainstream. Hitwise reports that last week Twitter became one of the 100 most visited websites in the UK for the first time.

It ranked 91st within All Categories, placing above online heavyweights such as Expedia UK (96), Gumtree (100), easyJet (101), Digital Spy (103) and Money Supermarket (105). Twitter traffic has already more than trebled this year, and much of that growth has come since we last wrote about the site in January… Over the last 12 months traffic to Twitter.com has increased 27 fold. However, the service is likely even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website.