Twitter accepted some money from Spark Capital and Jeff Bezos. The latter is interested because long ago I wrote that Twitter was far more of an e-commerce play than an ad play… but given the $150B US / $500B global advertising market, everyone and their cousin wants to have an advertising-based business model… which explains why most companies tend to rewrite their business plans of late (in other words: they have no business having an ad model, but I digress).
Anyway, I think this is the first step towards Amazon.com buying Twitter… it just makes more sense to use something like Twitter in a commercial capacity than a communications capacity, which is odd because Twitter now bills itself as a “communications utility”. Whatever floats their boat…
Today, the vanity crowd uses Twitter in the way that they do, in 5 years - if Twitter is around - it will be used as a commercial platform. Mark my words.
Tags: Amazon.com, Financing, Twitter|
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Jun 24th
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June 24th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
In the context of twitter, I’m not sure if there will be a difference between advertising and commerce.
People already tweet what they are purchasing, it’s just a small step to implement features that let others act on that data (not unlike Facebook’s beacon). That kind of transaction occupies a nice little middle ground between advertising and communication. Advertising of that kind can benefit all four parties in the transaction (referrer, purchaser, seller, twitter).
Well, hopefully some of the benefit will go to the referrer (unlike Beacon where the value is only split three ways).