Jeremy's Blog

If you’ve been keeping up with me like the good stalkers that you are, you’ll notice that I’ve been using Twitter, lately. (You can follow me, if you’re not already.) I didn’t buy into the whole Twitter thing at first, but it is sort of nice to be able to send a text message from my phone to a service that actually updates information in three separate places at once. Don’t follow me on Twitter? That’s fine, you can keep up with my status updates on Facebook. Even if you don’t use Facebook, you can see all of my updates on the widget on the left side of my blog.

What I think is absolutely fascinating (and maybe really, really stupid) is the fact that Twitter is receiving Venture Capital … To the tune of about $20 Million, for their third round of funding. For the uninformed, Twitter is a completely free service. They don’t even serve advertisements on their site. Again, for the uninformed, VCs are looking to see a return on their investment. A big return. In order for them to feel more confident about their investment, they usually place their own selected individuals in C-level or higher, often Company Board, positions within the company. That last point is the sole reason why Omega Vortex is against taking VC money.

I suppose I’m curious as to how Twitter expects to monetize a free service in a way that doesn’t severely anger their userbase and doesn’t include a buyout. Twitter has taken enough VC money at this point that buying options probably look unattractive to most would-be interested parties, because the price would have to be so high. Just serving advertisements on the website wouldn’t be enough income, because everyone that I know that uses Twitter rarely spend more time on the website than to start following new people. There are quite a few Twitter clients available, Spaz being the one that I use.

Speaking of severely angering the userbase, can you imagine what it would be like if Twitter tried the absurd idea of sending adverts through their own service? On second thought, would people even notice? Additionally, would they actually care? Spaz lets me keep up with all the latest from the people I follow, but if I get really busy and stop paying attention to it, quite a number of tweets can go by before I look at it again. Plenty enough for several advertisements, if they were to come every few hours or so, to go right by without my even noticing them.

People already hate advertisements. If they’re going to be there, they need to be mostly unobtrusive. I wonder how well people would cope with “Twitter Spam” … not to mention what kind of data mining it would take to send targeted advertisements, if the ads were to be targeted at all. Google’s done a decent job at serving up targeted ads that don’t get in your way or on your nerves, if implemented correctly. Ads that aren’t targeted are just annoying, these days. All ads are annoying, but those are certainly the worst.

Back to the thought of a buyout, what would the buyer actually be getting? Going back to the earlier mention of Facebook, neither Google nor Alexa seems to think that Twitter is all that interesting. Twitter’s traffic rank on Alexa is 780. Sure, that’s within the top 1000, but with still no obvious way to monetize the service, who’s going to throw a worthwhile bid at them? Obviously, Twitter isn’t going to take an offer that won’t make up for their investment money and leave plenty behind for the people behind the madness.

Twitter’s an interesting concept and it’s a nifty way to keep people in the loop on whatever it is you’re currently doing. Since mobile updates are as easy as a text message, Spaz easily lets me update without having to go to some webpage, and it updates three locations at once, it’s easy to remember and use.

With that said, I don’t think it’s worth $20 Million in Venture Capital.