Is Twitter Putting Too Many Eggs in the Ambiguity Basket?
To call Twitter’s recent growth explosive is an understatement. Citing numbers from comScore, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, in the past year alone, the number of Twitter users has increased from an estimated 1.6 million to 32.1 million. But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story: Twitter has become a pop culture icon. These days, you can hardly watch TV or read a blog without tripping over a Twitter mention . . . or a dozen Twitter mentions.
But what does it all mean? It seems that even Biz Stone and Evan Williams, Twitter’s founders and head honchos, aren’t quite sure to do with Twitter now that the genie is out of the bottle.
According to the Wall Street Journal, despite Twitter’s astronomical rise in usage, the company still only employs less than fifty people, and only a handful of those people have sales or traditional business experience. Rather, most of Twitter’s employees are focused on maintaining the Twitter service itself. According to Williams, as quoted by the Journal, “For the entire three year history of the company, most of the resources have gone to managing growth and that is still the case. If it weren’t growing nearly as fast, we would be building a lot more things.”
What they would be building, however, isn’t clear. And Twitter’s founders are seemingly unfazed by it. In fact, they seem to be embracing the ambiguity that surrounds Twitter’s purpose. What is it? For what sort of things should businesses use it? And, more importantly, perhaps, for Twitter’s long-term prospects: how is it going to generate any income?
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher during last week’s D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, CA, Williams and Stone seem undaunted by Twitter’s foray into the digital ether. Responding to a question about Twitter’s future revenue models, in which an audience member proposed that revenue may come from “something else we don’t even know about,” Stone embraced it.
“I like the third thing that you just said, something else that we don’t know about,” said Stone, as quoted by the Journal. “That’s been a huge part of Twitter—not putting too much fidelity on Twitter too early. If we did that we would be closing off an entire realm of amazing possibilities.”
That’s all well and good, but imagining an entire realm of amazing opportunities is one thing—imagination is cheap and full of upside. Banking on something amazing happening and taking hold is another thing altogether, for an entire realm of amazing possibilities also includes an entire realm of no possibilities at all. Even Williams’ and Stones’ imaginations seem to falter when asked to produce something tangible out of Twitter. Enhanced relationships between businesses and customers? Very pedestrian, and already easily done through other social networking sites—for free. Does Twitter really offer something radically different? Something so radically different that customers are willing to pay for it?
Perhaps Twitter’s whiz kids should be paying more attention to some sobering numbers produced by Harvard Business School’s Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski. In a May 2009 survey of 300,542 Twitter users, Heil and Piskorski discovered that a typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. According to Heil and Piskorski, the median mumber of lifetime tweets per user is one, meaking over half of Twitter users tweet less than once every 74 days. Moreover, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users account for over 90% of all tweets.
What do the numbers mean? According to Heil and Piskorski, the numbers mean that Twitter’s usage pattern more closely resembles Wikipedia’s usage pattern, where the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits. This implies that according to usage pattern, at least, Twitter resembles more of a one way, one-to-many publishing service than a two-way, peer-to-peer communications network.
Will Twitter, then, become yet another one-to-many content provider? And a provider of banal, pedestrian content at that? Does this really constitute an amazing possibility? Or has the great unwashed simply not yet uncovered the amazing possibilities of which Twitter is capable?
So far, investors haven’t batted an eyelash at Twitter’s open-ended promise, and have pumped over $55 million into the nascent company. But sooner or later, those chips are going to be called, and Twitter is going to have to figure out exactly what it is. And how, exactly, it’s going to provide a return for its investors. Who knows what the future holds for Twitter? One thing’s for sure, Williams and Stone are unfazed by the unknown.
By Robert Pothier