dennismoulton

Wow, to say that Twitter owns the protocol is quite a statement at this early stage of the game for this space. Twitter just took the number one third-party feature and integrated it into their own platform, it’s called lists and if you don’t have it you will soon. What would protect me from the same? “Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the recipients." Let’s not be so shortsighted here. The opportunity is to innovate in the space and that just doesn’t mean on top of. Sounds like we just limited our options to those that can partner with instead of those that compete.

So with a 1B valuation from this round - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/16/twitter-closing-new-ven... we are looking at a $22+ price tag per user. This may be on the low end however as with 45 million users it is assuming that all accounts are active. I don't think that the media love affair with the company is driving all of this. If say half of the accounts are active (daily) and 10% of those are using search (weekly) then they have enough to throw an ad layer and cpa may do o.k. as part of this. If the large part of this activity is taking place via third-party then the ad layer has to be exposed in the API. Anyhow if 1.17B search queries take place annually (maybe this is low end if you include partners) and you have 5% paid click-through on that (assuming all queries trigger the ad layer) you are looking at 58.5M paid actions annually.

Wells Fargo is the best for merchant services (next day deposit) and also have a great service stack for things like payroll. I had a company that used them for both and they were great. We also had a savings account with a regional bank (WCB). The small guys work harder for your business and will pay a better % (even in liquid accounts) and you may need the relationship someday for a line of credit.

It's always a thrill to listen to Steve Ballmer talk about the company roadmap and it's hard to imagine that anyone could do a better job in that role. The company faces the law of large numbers and an uphill battle against perception (at least on the consumer client side) but the innovation and execution strategy for incumbent slots and catch-up slots is dialed in (as it seems to always have been).

So in your case....dealing with a hard technical problem the current establishment of forums for richer discussions and interaction could leverage the power of community, no? Would a microblog version of what is now specific forums be enough of an experience to handle the majority of what needs to be covered? Would you be willing to participate in this manner if there was an extra step to finding the specific conversation home (within the platform) for the request, question, or dialogue?

Sure, influencers and celebrities benefit from the broadcast without a doubt but is it possible that the back and forth conversation is limited (post, possibly a reply, and that is usually the end of it) to make the rest of the user base just feel like they have been heard. Of course there are consumers and contributors in the mix but I would like to think that more value could exist via real conversations.

Glad you brought that up....what is valuable in twitter? The tangential ramblings of a handpicked group? I would argue that only a small subset of even the very best lists actually equates to value for most users.