Business Plan Required? Twitter Attracts Funding by Posting Drivel for Free
Twitter.com, the site that lets users answer the question "What are you up to?," recently announced that it had received an undisclosed amount of investment from Union Square Ventures. The site has also received funding from other investors such as Marc Andreesen.
A internet start-up attracting investors seems like routine enough news, but nonetheless, this particular deal has attracted a lot of comment. Why? As Sam Diaz writes in the Washington Post column Post I.T.,
"it's still somewhat unclear what the exact business model is for this company. It's not bringing in any revenue and doesn't seem to have a solid plan on how it will generate money."InternetFinancialNews.com disagrees with this assessment, saying "Twitter HAS a business plan and has done a lot of thought about where future revenues will come from.... They just arent going to show it to us. "
But further criticism is leveled at the site today by Information Week's Andrew Conry-Murray. His complaint: the site's content is 'drivel'.
"Thanks to spam and an infinite supply of inane blogs, the Internet's signal-to-noise ratio is already dangerously out of whack. Twitter's emphasis on immediacy simply ramps up the injection rate of crap into the communication stream."Twitter seems to be a site with "drivel" for content, no revenue, and no business plan. But Conry-Murray concedes that "Twitter's value exists outside the actual content of the messages.... This system can surely be expanded to distribute all kinds of content. Inevitably, along with content comes advertising. Hey presto--a business model."
The content of the site does seem to be uninspiring for the time being, and it's doubtful that, as it stands now, it is doing anything to increase the collective IQ of the web. Of course, the creativity of users and developers could find new and heretofore unimagined uses for the platform which generate substantial returns for investors. Or enthusiasm for the likes of Twitter could just be the start of bubble and bust 2.0.