Steffest Digitale Pulptuur

Twitter bubble

a picture called twitter1.jpg (click to enlarge) Appart from looking to twitter as (another) social network thing, this article rephrases my exact thoughts when I twitted around a bit: Who the hell is paying for this and how on earth are they planning to turn this into a profitable service?

For people that don't know Twitter: its a platform to post small messages, that gets forwarded to anyone that chooses to follow you.
This forwarding can be done by IM, RSS, email or .. SMS ... and thats the weird part of it: you can link you mobile number to your twitter account, and then you can use SMS to update your messages, and/or receive the messages of your friends.

So you can type in a messages in a webpage, and all your friends get it as SMS .... for free ...
receiving messages is free (in europe) but sending SMS-messages isn't (anywhere in the world)
At the moment, Twitter is sending out 200.000 SMS messages a day, that's 6 million a month, to mobile networks all over the world, without charging the users anything.
Even the most optimistic estimates point towards a monthly cost of at least 60.000 dollar.

Common sense dictates that something clearly is wrong in this picture: it follows the line of thinking that creating a huge userbase automatically gives value to your company.

Indeed: It looks to me like a bubble that's going to burst.
I hope time will prove me wrong, though :-)

If it survives, it's a brilliant service to keep a group of people posted, for example in projectgroups, or loosly tied organisations.
I'll start some experiments with that ... Geef je reactie (0)