How does twitter make money, exactly? (I'm dead serious, I don't know)
I think it's time we stop taking that for the gospel and admit that it's actually quite possible for a company to get a huge user base and still fail to make money permanently.
That wouldn't exactly be comforting if it was my money on the table.
But there has to be an inflection point somewhere. Look at youtube, they will never be in the black (taken on their own).
So either they turn a profit, and this piece of wisdom is strongly reinforced. Or they go under, and entrepreneurs and VCs lose a certain glint in their eye. Or they get bought... and probably no one's mind is changed.
Just like Facebook, right!?
It doesn't matter how big either of those numbers are, as long as the equations stand. Most argue that the equation in facebook's case fails.
http://calacanis.com/2008/01/02/the-three-business-models-th...
Nobody moved to an ad-free social network once Facebook started placing ads.
Hasn't stopped people using it.
Sure they can make some money from subscriptions, but Twitter is not a $50/month or even $50/year service in my opinion.
Today, I opened my T-Mo statement, and there was a Twitter ad inside. Still no IM and SMS, though. No matter how big their user base gets, that looks like a show stopper to me.
AllAdvantage is a perfect example of why you can't allow client side services to be calculating things that really should be done server side. You could send a magical packet that would log all your hours for a month instantly.
Sorry about the offtopic rant :)