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- vtbarrera, on 02/03/2009, -0/+27What would Google do with twitter?
- michaelpinto, on 12/30/2008, -2/+18For the Record: I'm not anti-Google — I sort of have mixed feelings. On one hand you have a wreck like Blogger that Google hasn't done much with — and then you have YouTube which they seem to be doing well with. I hate it when they do things like Knol, but would die without their search functionality.
- tnerd, on 12/30/2008, -0/+16Why does that sound negative to me?? Googlephobia!
- Subacious, on 12/31/2008, -0/+15Twitter makes no money. Digg makes no money. How / why would Digg do this?
- celebsport, on 12/30/2008, -5/+20 good move for google to buy twitter but it makes this industry become samller with major of big company buy the small one
- isntreal, on 12/31/2008, -1/+15I think Twitter is the least monetizable and most over hyped site since... well, Digg.
- shakeysugarpimp, on 12/30/2008, -4/+17My prediction, google purchases united states in 2013. names newly purchased country Googletopia.
- BillyB, on 12/30/2008, -0/+11Maybe Digg should buy Twitter.
- dafpoo, on 12/31/2008, -0/+9Google wouldn't buy twitter because they already own jaiku which is the exact same thing. It would make more sense if facebook bought if anyone...
- hmunkey, on 12/31/2008, -1/+9It's better than it used to be, at least it is higher definition and has a better interface.
My main problems are the player is still ugly and the comments are stupid. - Bauer22, on 12/31/2008, -0/+62015: Google purchases start up company Cyberdyne Systems.
- companionsphere, on 12/31/2008, -0/+6grammar?
- BitKid, on 12/31/2008, -0/+6English *****, do you speak it?!
- Irishsmurf, on 12/30/2008, -0/+6Not something I would like, Google buying Youtube worried me, Google buying Twitter frightens me, they would find some sort of way to shove adverts into our faces
- justaddwater, on 12/30/2008, -1/+6the same thing google does with everything else probably... not a lot of changes, but use it to promote their other stuff
- Scott2, on 12/30/2008, -2/+6i would not consider john c dvorak respectable, even as a hack.
- malhotrak, on 12/31/2008, -0/+4I'm not quite sure why they would want to buy twitter, when they already have a competing product - Jaiku? Agreed, it doesn't have much audience at the moment, but maybe because it's being transitioned to Google infrastructure. I'm sure Google will be promoting it once it's bedded in...
Yes, I agree with some of the comments above that a service like twitter is hard to monetize - does anyone know how yammer is doing at the moment - they were trying to monetize micro-blogging by creating a closed network. - MScrip, on 12/31/2008, -0/+4Facebook has ads... don't they make money from that?
And if a "popular" site, with millions of users every second seeing those ads, can't make any money... what hope is there for the ad-supported internet?
Twitter has no ads. There's a problem right there. Google makes ALL their money from ads. Facebook could to. Some people visit Facebook more often than Google. - baldr, on 12/31/2008, -0/+42 cents per facebook user is still millions of dollars.
- Danteling, on 12/31/2008, -0/+4I was scratching my head about how twitter can continue to perpetuity with no revenues. Doesn't seem like Google needs to be in any hurry over this. Although now is the time to get good deals.
- Perplexion, on 12/31/2008, -0/+4You mean Googletopia beta.
- hmunkey, on 12/31/2008, -0/+3Correction to all of you: What is wrong with your grammar?
Complete sentences *****! - kinthiri, on 12/31/2008, -0/+3The same thing they've done with Jaiku. Nothing at all.
Jaiku offers all the features of Twitter as well as a lot more. Yet Google has done absolutely nothing with it since acquiring it. Not even put advertising on the page. Jaiku has a large European following (larger than on Twitter) as well as an extremely large Asian following. Yet unless you go looking through the documentation, its barely noticeable that its a Google company.
Theres no chance of Google buying Twitter. Not when they already have Jaiku. It just wouldn't make sense. The only thing holding Jaiku back is that it exists outside the US and was developed by a Finnish group rather than an American group. - WhoDoneIt, on 12/31/2008, -1/+4Yes! I've always wanted news stories of only 160 characters long.
- ElbertF, on 12/31/2008, -0/+3Google did buy Twitter clone Jaiku.
- Atomic1fire, on 12/31/2008, -0/+2Twitter will probably not last long without ads.
Reason one, They don't have any other monetary gains,
Reason two, They can do ads tastefully, Look at meebo, While they have obvious ads bought up by the music industry, it can be minused and relatively ignored, Or embraced if you like the music that happens to be shown, Not only that, but stuff like incredible hulk wallpapers and things show up, and either meebo is paying to display this stuff, Or the companies are paying them and I think its more of the latter.
reason three, The only way to not show ads is if they are bought up and the money comes from elsewhere, with ads still being displayed, but intercompanyfied, so they just display notices about other company owned services, or if they start charging companies for professional accounts, or start charging everyone for extra features. - RobotBuddha, on 12/31/2008, -0/+2It's an irc program where you get to pick who's on the channel.
- TheShad0w, on 12/31/2008, -0/+2I don't understand why people are digging you down.
Let me break down business economics101
Revenue - The total income, both cash and non cash, received from an enterprise or business, before any expenses are paid.
So yes. Even if they have ads and they do have some revenue from them you have to take into account operating costs; such as salaries, power, technology.
When you take all that out the fact is that Twitter and Facebook aren't profitable. They have yet to come up with a business model that would lead them to profitability.
Since they aren't profitable and more VC money isn't coming there is a very strong chance they will have to make some very tough decisions such as scaling back personnel, scaling back their technical foot print, or closing the doors all together.
My experience points towards letting some people go and trying to weather the economy till they can come up with a profitable business model or find more VC. - Dylson, on 12/31/2008, -0/+2I eagerly await that day!
- BabyHulk, on 01/01/2009, -0/+2some interesting predictions here....but i think google will acquire everything by the year 2020.
- HanSolo69, on 12/31/2008, -2/+4Dvorak respectable? Buried as inaccurate.
- lilx, on 12/31/2008, -0/+1Yeah, and Google bought YouTube when it has Google Video to do the exact same thing.
- kinthiri, on 12/31/2008, -0/+1Why would Google buy Twitter when they already have Jaiku and do nothing with it? Jaiku has a massive marketshare in Europe (was founded in Finland) and SMS updates and notifications actually work for most regions including Europe, the Pacific, Asia [except those naughty folk in Indonesia] and Africa as well as both American continents. They'd be wasting their time buying yet another product that produces no income.
Twitter will run out of money and die off unless they can convince someone with lots of money and no sense to give Twitter lots of money. In the end that there is no money in micro-blogging unless you make it a subscription based service. And no one likes Twitter enough to pay to use it. They'd just move to another service instead... Like say... Google's Jaiku? - ElBeh, on 12/31/2008, -0/+1Holy crap, they did indeed.
Well then. - DMCer, on 06/02/2009, -0/+1"Not when they already have Jaiku. It just wouldn't make sense."
Like when they "didn't" by YouTube because they already had Google Video? - MavRevMatt, on 12/31/2008, -1/+2If Digg was making money and Twitter had a plan it could make sense, because the two are both ways to share content with friends and other people on the internet, however seeing as neither has a good business model it wouldn't make any sense.
Then again... - agentpx, on 12/31/2008, -1/+2I prefer Dvorak's keyboard!
<<<Buried this forever - mrBitch, on 12/31/2008, -0/+1Jaiku? That's a lot harder to remember than "twitter".
- mrBitch, on 12/31/2008, -1/+2Youtube definitely improved after google bought it.
What I find funny is this prediction, FTA :
" 2009 This will be the point where people realize that not only is Microsoft serious about going after Google, but they’re in it to win ... "
Microsoft has been trying to dominate Google for the last 4 years.
Only a few months ago, Microsoft failed in their attempts to buy Yahoo (this attempt also proved that Microsoft themselves have admitted their failure to get into the "google space").
It's kind of like "this is the year of Linux on the desktop".
ie. "this is the year Microsoft dominates over Google". - diggdatt, on 12/31/2008, -1/+2Buried as Inaccurate. This is nothing but speculation and *****. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, Google will be buying the toilet paper roll from my house.
- inactive, on 01/27/2009, -0/+1Venture Capitalists
- NextGenXbox, on 01/01/2009, -0/+1They would rename it Twigle.
- WaddleDee, on 12/31/2008, -0/+1I, for one, welcome our Google overlords.
- Pyroteq, on 12/31/2008, -1/+2Costs them money to maintain the site.
- MavRevMatt, on 12/31/2008, -1/+2Before everyone buries this for Twitter, he also mentions some other things he "forcasts" in 2009, a few of which are actually somewhat plausible. The ones I agree with the most are about Sun, Microsoft, Mahalo, and Yahoo. Calacanis has more money than Mahalo needs, even for some runway in the future, and in a bad market and declining newspaper readership the NYT may want to unload about.com, and then of course everyone knows by now that Yahoo will never get acquired, there's nothing really worth it besides ad dollars for any company to bother.
- DMCer, on 06/02/2009, -0/+1Hopefully shut it down.
- systemghost, on 12/31/2008, -1/+2lol, this article is terrible. I'm glad the author used up some of his time alive writing it, because if he were doing something else with such a heaping helping of fail I strongly feel innocent lives could have been lost.
- inactive, on 01/27/2009, -0/+1Google already has Jaiku.
Twitter should rename themselves to ***** for all the micro-blogging diarrhea they serve up - MavRevMatt, on 12/31/2008, -1/+2Anyone else find it ironically funny that all of the recommendations above the comments are from Dvorak?
- malhotrak, on 12/31/2008, -0/+1A service like twitter with all it's infrastructure and scalability will take a long time to bring to the market (read longer than 6 months)... plus they will then have to iron out the bugs with an initial beta release (can't just copy twitter's source code you know).
Then they'd need to build up the user numbers and the community around it (both go hand in hand, can't have one without the other) - which would at least be a 2 year undertaking... and who knows where twitter would be by then... hence it makes sense to buy it.
However, GOOG have saved money by buying an unkown service Jaiku, which IMO, is currently being transferred across to Google's servers. It may be a midway solution between building a service up from scratch and buying something like twitter (whose source code is too matured right now to tweak as per Google's internal coding parameters).
Then next step for Google will be to chart out the product plan for it - how it would interact with other services - gmail etc. How it would fit in with OpenSocial etc. How would they be able to monetize such a thing etc. -
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