Three Reasons Why Twitter Will Be Sold Soon

Who will buy Twitter? That should be on every user's mind because it's going to happen fast. Let's look at the facts first.

Fact #1: According to Technology Review, Twitter had 100,000 users at the end of March. More important, the community is doubling in size every three weeks. That kind of hockey stick growth is the stuff of legends. We're talking ICQ and YouTube territory. They're not going to sit on the shelf for long.

Fact #2: Twitter doesn't monetize its audience right now, but it's working on it. However, there's an important thought to consider. Many of the the most active people on Twitter are serious influencers. Further, a lot of them voluntarily receive messages via IM or, even better, on their mobile phones. That's every marketer's dream. If Obvious Corp, Twitter's parent company, can come up with a way to let the community opt into relevant mobile messages, it will be a cash cow. You can get a taste of this by checking out Woot on Twitter. Some 1700 people already opt-in to receiving deal notices via these channels.

Fact #3: Twitter is a cheap acquisition target right now. Yes, some question its staying power, but my gut is that the site will stick. Once Obvious Corp starts to monetize the community, the cost will go up. Now is the time to get in. Wait around and the price tag will go up.

Now, onto potential suitors. As you look across the landscape, Facebook is currently a great fit for Twitter. I wouldn't count out others like Yahoo or Google either.

Regardless of who wins the bidding war, make no mistake, change is coming. If Ev and Biz want to sell - which of course is an open question - Twitter will be eaten up real soon.

Comments

[Colin Henderson]

You are surely right and Facebook is a good call. Why do I feel sad :-(

[Robert Scoble]

You're missing the even bigger opportunity for marketers: people are telling us WHAT THEY USE and WHAT THEY LIKE.

If you can listen and learn to engage people on Twitter you'll find a marketing goldmine here. If I were really smart, I'd hire a team to categorize each Twitterer 24-hours-a-day. I'd start building a database of behaviors shared.

Someone say "changing the diapers." Well, now we know they have a newborn at home. What could marketers do with THAT? TONS!

[/pd]

They have a solid hosted platform service that can scale well.. so why sale so soon ??

even if thye have 300K users/signup's does not mean that all of them actually use the service.

BTw, why do you think that Facebook is good fit ?? why not myspace or just bout any other social media app ??

[LonelyBloggers]

Twitter isn't overly complex from a technology standpoint and I imagine there are several 'twitters' in the works right now. I'd build before buying twitter because their platform can be replicated in a very short period of time.

[twitter.com/alagami]

Good call by Scoble. Another thing to remember is the regional part. People love to tell twitters where they come from. Some even do it precisely so you can find them on googlemap. So the marketing can be regional as well. That would be interesting for quite a lot of campaigns.

I also think that EV and team must be working hard right now to make it sellable. I am not sure if they were aware of the success twitter got. They are properly rewriting quite a lot over there right now ;-)

The future of twitter lies in the hands of EV+team. In the long run the future of the popularity of twitter is in the hands of the company that buys it. If twitter becomes too much commercialized, the user will dissapear.

(parden my english. I am danish).

;)Lars

[Web 2.0 Media]

Steve, i'm sorry to disappointed you but i don't see it happening from some reasons.
it doesn't matter how many register users you have, the most important, i can't see any business model behind it,
and no serious company will spend money for it.
it's a buzz that will gone quick as it appeared.
it's nice tool to play with, but the truth? there is nothing behind it :)

[tony pierce]

i dont think they will sell for a while. why not ride it out and have fun being the prettiest girl at the dance for a while?

[Thor]

It's a particularly good point about Woot. By blurring the lines between micro-content from friends and other sources (media, commercial, political, etc) Twitter is defining a newly efficient messaging space. A lot of us are starting to use Twitter to send and monitor things like presidential campaign news (e.g. John Edwards) and Web service updates (e.g. Ma.gnol.ia). It's different than mere RSS because of both its constraint (140 characters that optimizes time and space) and its delivery options (web, IM, SMS, RSS, API). With the advent of two way Twitterbots that respond to privately Twittered queries, the system may soon act as a universal command line to the Web of data. There are many, many ways to monetize this emergent system.

Those who dismiss Twitter as a childish novelty limited to microblogging meaningless ephemera would be well advised to think a few chess moves ahead.

[Jeremy Toeman]

2 reasons why I don't agree:

1) they aren't a traffic acquisition, 100K users is a blip and is most likely exaggerated anyway. Not even comparable to Youtube/ICQ, not by a long shot.

2) they aren't really a technology acquisition - not that they haven't built anything, but it's hardly defensible tech.

Facebook already offers a Twitter service, so that's not gonna happen.

Yahoo/Google won't buy for the reasons above

If there's an acqusition here, it's by a different player than those, maybe a Cnet or Wired, or possibly even an Amazon/Ebay (for reasons similar to what Scoble mentioned, although with a lot less exuberance). Ideally someone can pick them up and grow them up into something big...

[Laura]

Facebook isn't a great one to buy it, in my opinion. There should, however, be an automated way to make your "facebook status" whatever you put on Twitter.

[NexTechNews]

Jeremy... Your right the number probably is bloated but the fact is 100k users or close to it isnt chump change, and in some cases if a group has the right idea thats about the point you want to get in... If it had the amount of users youtube had it wouldnt be a good buy i mean come on then its in the millions if not billions of dollars and is way overpriced.

And facebook doesnt really have the lock down on the market either ya their big but by no means a lock like youtube had.

Chris | NTN

[twitter.com/alagami]

I aggree that twitter is not a technological revolution. Being in the mobile-business i cant help to think of Twitter as a messaging-gateway and the only difference from a mobile-gateway is that the messages you send are public and not directed to one person.

Anyone can build a twitter pretty fast. So that might bring down the value of twitter. But i cant stop thinking about what generally all IM's are missing today. They alle have personal-messaging. But what about a public channel on your msn, aim og gogglechat? I will not be surprised if we see this in near future.

The idea of google as a good buyer would be for google to merge twitter and Googlechat. I've been using gchat for a longtime and been following its success or the lack of the same. I think that google would have a better chance of success with googlechat if they aquired twitter and rebuilt googlechat by (somehow) merging twitter and googlechat. That would also be a new way of IMing. now we have an IM that's only personal if you want to.
a new name? Gwitter ;-)

[Andrew Eglinton]

If I were a capital investor, I'd be hiring people to find ways of integrating Twitter technology in other popular social networking platforms and going for a bigger package. Twitter is the tip of a new communication iceburg, global, immediate and the Successor to RSS.

[twitter.com/alagami]

Had a look at jaiku.com which, in its shape, is a twitter-ripoff. They have some of the stuff that twitter so badly needs, and it got me to think about where or what the twitter-team is doing. They must be doing something that will make twitter stick up against competetion. Maybe the twitter-team should write a little about whats coming;-)
In my opinion jaiku is a much more sellabe/white-labeling ready product compared to twitter. It looks very much like something that mobile-operators would love to have.

I heard some rumours that one or more persons from the company behind twitter left and got into jaiku. Can anyone confirm if this is true or false?

Mr. Rubel. Sorry for using your comments on writing this, but i find it the right spot to put it. And thankyou for a very inspiring blog which i would have never found if it wasnt for twitter. Thats exactly what i use twitter for. Finding interesting persons/new-movers.

;-)Lars

[Mark]

Mr. Rubel, why you keep pumping Twitter? We the bloggers can easily see thru all these hype you are doing.

[jjprojects]

Good call Steve. I certainly wouldn't count out Google, no, not after the acquisitions they have been making. It'll be very interesting to see what happens.

I have noticed quite a few news organisations using Twiiter to broadcast News updates as well.

[Sundarlal Chuddha]

I have twitter account but nobody want to see what i do

[Ryan]

I think some of the biggest potential areas for Twitter don't even exist on the service yet. They could do a general information service, starting with an existing SMS-savvy user base and a great SMS conduit (40404).

What if Twitter partnered with an online movie listing site, paying to get a Twitter "namespace" of some kind, so I could just SMS "movies 96813" to 40404 to get movie listings in Honolulu? Or "weather" for the weather in my home area? You could "follow" a sports team for news and scores. You could do AI-like voting, you could opt-in for local party notices, you could "d mom" to send a SMS to someone you've defined without worrying about phone numbers.

Right now people see Twitter as a microblog or a presence thing or a service that connects users... but I think plugging in other services so people Twitter them as well as friends is where the money is.

[Charlie]

Did you see the bet?

http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2007/10/jaiku-throws-in.html