Twitter As ‘Global Communications Utility’? Hang On Now…
Twitter — the tech-elite-popular SMS-like micro-publishing/messaging service, if you didn’t know — this week announced $10 million in funding, including an investment from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The Bezos addition is interesting because if anyone knows how to scale an online business it’s Amazon — and Twitter definitely needs help scaling because despite (or probably more likely because of) its popularity the service has suffered repeated downtime.
In announcing the investment, the Twitter blog proclaimed the service’s goal was not to come up with a business model (at least not yet) but rather to establish itself as “a global communications utility.”
At its core, Twitter is SMS-for-large-groups. If with SMS you send a personal message to one person, with Twitter you send a not-so-personal message to everybody “following” you — for some super-users, that’s thousands of followers at a time. The result is a kind of highly-distributed “town-crier” effect in which news and new ideas spread very quickly across the Twitter-sphere.
As a would-be “communications utility” and a clear cousin to the extremely lucrative SMS, Twitter would seem to hold appeal to service providers. But without a business model in sight, can carriers really be bothered with Twitter? The clear answer seems no.
And that’s too bad, because Twitter could use a dose of “five-nines” religion right now if it’s ever to make it pass the early adopter phase and into the mainstream. As the telco industry knows, the SMS explosion came with its own growing pains.
The biggest difference, however, is that even as SMS was growing (and struggling to grow) carriers were able to track — and bill — on per-SMS-message basis while Twitter continues to search for a way to turn Tweets into revenue.
