Image via the Guardian UK. It seems we’ve all been following the “fail whale” drama at Twitter as they’ve struggled to manage their growth. Tales of Twitter’s imminent demise are spread across the blogosphere. As you can see from the chart above, their growth has started slowing in recent months and active Twitterers (me included) started looking at alternatives like Friendfeed. Then, last week, in what seemed like the final straw, they “lost” a whole bunch of followers - we saw the “ego effect” kick in and some people got really mad. In the past few days, the lost followers (sans spammers) have magically reappeared as promised by Ev Williams, Twitter’s founder. So, what’s next for Twitter? I’m very bullish on Twitter … They’ve recently acquired Summize, a 3rd party Twitter search tool and have rebranded and integrated their service offering into the Twitter experience. This brings several very valuable assets into the fold:
Search - Twitter provides a quick shorthand pulse of what’s hot across the globe. I find it fascinating that a 3rd party company was able to build a better search tool than Twitter could themselves, using Twitter’s own API. I think we’ll see more of these types of symbiotic acquisitions in our new open-source innovation world Key talent - the engineers from Summize are all moving to San Francisco to work at Twitter. I’m sure they’ll be offered the opportunity to create new tools / services / products as Twitter starts exploring monetization options beyond the basic “slap a banner ad on the page” strategy that we’ve seen fail at Facebook and other social networks
Will Twitter be valued at $15 billion? Perhaps not but if I was a VC, I’d be lining up for their next round of funding. Bookmark to:
July 28 2008, 3:37pm | Original Link »
