Friday, April 3, 2009

Resist Twitter?

Twitter is a lottery with a key difference. The winning ticket was drawn "before" the tickets went on sale. Biz Stone, founder of Twitter, has the winning ticket, but we still feel compelled to buy tickets. We don't want to be "left out", "un-cool" or out of sync with the Obama generation. Everyone talks about Twitter although the old line about "how are they gonna make money" is starting to wane. We all know the answer. After a billion tickets (or Tweets) the winning number will be drawn (sort of) and the winning ticket holder (Biz Stone) will come forward to collect his One Billion Dollars. Yep, that's what this is all about.

Text messaging across the celluar-internet boundary at 140 characters (vs. 160 for SMS), and a clever name. The guys at YouTube got $1.6B for little more than that. Chad and Steve didn't invent "user generated video", they just had a clever name, and a venture backer who happened to be on the board of directors at Google.

Biz Stone is a former Google employee. He made Blogger (the application hosting this blog) a success for Google.

And if you are still wondering why anyone would care if you are eating a bagel or picking your nose, you're right - they don't. Twitter will persist as yet another electronic message conduit - a mechanism to influence while informing you, like Google, Yahoo, CNN, etc., and those who profit from providing the conduit like Verizon and TMobile.
"Psst, there's a bagel crumb stuck to your cheek".


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