The Social Networker

by Chris Miller at 12:35:35 PM on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Twitter has no real revenue model in place.  Money is being brought in from investors still, as they struggle with growth.  Consumers of the service are actually handling business deals and negotiations, while Twitter sits idly by, while not always available recently, helping out.  If we compare how Twitter is going about earning their own revenue, they are almost announcing that they will not be in business long on their current pace.  Even with the current rumblings of it being worth 1 billion dollars.  The company is not worth the suggested market price, it is the users of the service that are being valued.  Let me explain my thought.

Everyone knows by now that Twitter sucked up the powerful Twitter search engine Summize (which kindly goes to http://search.twitter.com now).  I found it interesting this occurred after some more financing took place too.  Let's take a twist on the purchase.  Suppose they did not do it just to enhance their own ability to offer searches of past tweets.  Instead, they are bringing in Summize to augment an ad generated content stream that sees what you talk about and drives you down an ad path.  It sees keywords, topics, meta info and a billion other things.  From there, they sell ad space (in the tweets as short links) to targeted consumer spaces based on this meta information.

Imagine the amount of data you have shared about yourself via Twitter?  Location, foods, travels, friends, shows you attended, books you read, articles you read, music you listen to.  It goes on and on.  Summize has all of this, with your name attached.  You have effectivly opened yourself up to being targeted directly by vendors willing to spend money on 140 character text lines.  There is no TiVo to skip over the commercials, you will get them.  I imagine being able to block them out won't be an option either, unless you go premium paid service.  Also, all those nice little links you place in your tweets, imagine a redirector capturing where you go and what the content was.  From there, you get a small ad pop-up before you get the actual site.  The possibilities are endless, and you gave them the ammo.

Instant messaging clients followed this same trend if you had not noticed.  When the services first came out, providers such as AOL and Yahoo gave the service to members of their network.  AOL was a paid service and Yahoo was ad driven.  Then demand pushed them both into allowing anyone to use just the chat pieces.  It worked well to get their name as the leader until usage out grew infrastructure costs.  So AOL and Yahoo both inserted ads into their clients.  This ad revenue is not only blind, but based on other items of what you have done under your logged in name on their sites.  Twitter now has that same ability.

Doing a search, Aidan Henry on RWW brought this same idea up in May in this article.  He had a slightly different slant, saying maybe every 20 tweets would be an ad, but we btoh agree there would be a premium ad free model that costs users.  Coupled with this would be support for more advanced features.

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Yes this is a blatant theft of the outline that Jess uses on her page, but I asked permission. Why?? Because I am a hardcore admin and can make ugly tables to make you developers frustrated, but this was too nice to pass up.

Also Known As: Chris Miller (when awake)

Boring Certifications: (only because someone asked twice)

  • Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5 - Team Collab and Messaging
  • Domino 7 Certified Security Administrator
  • PCLP ND7
  • PCLP ND6
  • PCLP R5
  • PCLP R4
  • CLP Collaboration (soon to be retired Aug 2006)
  • random former R4 exams
  • CLI for numerous admin areas including Domino, Sametime and Workplace
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Yes, I write some of those dreaded admin cert exams you take. I won't say which ones so you don't come looking for me, but I will say they are the real good recent ones that have been coming out.

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  • At work an IBM 2 GHz
  • At home a plethera of 6 machines with various Windows versions and Red Hat on a wired/wireless LAN
  • A Toshiba E740 with 802.11b (yes geek toy)
  • An Apple 40GB iPod that is filled to the brim
  • Compaq RioPort MP3 player (now in storage)
  • An EBook (REB1100) also for travel (Love that darn thing)
  • Verizon and they always seem to know how to find me, damn cell

Animals:

One dog, a Pug. He has been on this world before and seems to understand slippers and a fine cigar. Mind you that is him in the chair and not me.

Let us now also add a deranged cat that is in the process of being toilet trained. Update: Toilet traning was very very close.

Music:

Non-stop. At my desk, in my car, walking to work and back to my car downtown. In the house there is a crazy zoned set-up for you home automation geeks.

I am a self-proclaimed MP3 fiend, to which I have tried rehab 4 billion times to no avail. Next is the MP3 hard-drive for the car that I found. Now what kind of music you ask? I will never tell.

Languages:

  • Incredibly fast English
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Geek class special abilities:

  • Notes/Domino overdrive
  • Workplace
  • Sametime
  • Active Directory (huh? kidding)
  • Quickplace
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Skills:

Get back to you here

Spells:

Hershey’s Stomach of Holding: Jess and I are fighting over who eats more chocolate. TWDUFF can help me out and vouch for me.

Character Bio:

This will take far more time than I have today. I will start with I was born and still live in St. Louis, MO. Even though for a couple years I was never, ever here and always on the road, this is smack in the middle of the US. Everything is just a few hour flight. That part is nice. No beach/ocean/coast isn't the best. But with the travel I make up for it.

Don't Panic

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