The big news in business and the big new in tech this week is that twitter has gone Public. Facebook did this fairly recently, and the cynic in me says it could be the harbinger of doom. I’ve never been a huge fan of facebook anyway (as regular readers will vouch, or even this article by me will testify) but since they’ve floated, they’ve become worse. They’ve got to make a return for their investors and they’re doing this by being more and more aggressive with advertising. They’re sneaking it in where ever possible in more and more devious ways.
times.com ran an article a few days ago in response to twitter’s market capitalisation of nearly $25 billion, speculating over how much the people of twitter would get, if they dolled out the dollar to the people that made it through their continued support, their hard work, their blood sweat and tears. Here’s how I came out of their number crunching wizzardy..
I think I should get a bonus for being one of the early adopters though. They should at least offer to do swapsies for stock (I’d swap my fictional $57 for one share, if anyone’s able to sort that for me).
It’s interesting though – how twitter, now one of the richest companies in the world has never turned a profit. They’ve been very low key with advertising and they don’t sell their data. They’ve got to get their commercial game face on to keep their 40+ on the NYSE.
Where could twitter go from here? They could sell out and put advertising in line or they could take it to a new direction. Maybe they’ll announce an additional 10 characters to a typical tweet or something.
Perhaps Aaron Levie (founder of a now mahoosive personal cloud storage company called Box) has nailed the future. He recently tweeted..
“Blogs made it hard for me to read full articles. Now tweets make blogs hard to read. Soon, I’ll only be able to consume shapes.”
… We’re doomed.
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