How important is Twitter to you? How big a part of your day?
Techcrunch had this mildly interesting story today, about how Twitter has apparently supplanted Facebook as a key component in the forthcoming iOS5. Yeah, whatever. But it reminded me of something I’d intended to blog about: how important a part of my social networking Twitter is now, how important it is for others, and how secure that place is for the future.
As far as I know, Twitter still doesn’t have a revenue stream sufficient to cover its costs. Probably not even close. The only thing I can see is promoted tweets, and I can’t believe they bring in a huge amount. So essentially, while being valued at $3.7 billion at the end of last year, the company appears to be dependent on continued injections of venture capital ($200M last December). So in spite of that outstanding valuation, the future of Twitter cannot be considered in any sense secure. Couple that with the obvious underfunding of infrastructure evidenced by the continued appearance of the Fail Whale and similar problems, and Twitter devotees can be forgiven for being worried.
So how important is Twitter?
I have only been a regular (obsessive?) user this year, although I’ve had an account for a long time. The addition of lists and hashtags has, for me, made a significant difference to it’s utility, as has improvements to the web interface, and the acquisition of an iPad with a (moderately) good Twitter app. But I work on the principal that my behaviour is unlikely to be unique, and so I would expect that many others would also be using Twitter more often. This seems to be borne out by the statistics, with Twitter showing a surge in new accounts over the past year.
The second thing, and unless you’re a hermit you’ll know this already, is the surge in the use of Twitter by peoples protesting for democracy and freedom from repressive regimes, notably in the Arab world. This has led to a view of twitter being an invaluable and essential tool for democratic change.
So … on the one hand, we have Twitter as an increasingly valuable, if not essential, service to millions of people. And on the other hand, it’s future seems entirely dependent on continued injections of VC funds. A worry? Has Twitter become a service so important that it simply cannot be allowed to fail?
Happily, the Techcrunch story cited at the beginning of this posts suggests an answer. If Apple are embedding twitter into their next iOS release, and given that Apple has a cash reserve of $50 billion, can an acquisition be far off? Or, even if there’s nothing planned, can we at least assume the likelihood of an Apple buyout should twitter get into strife? Or if not Apple, then Google, who desperately need some cred in the social mediascape?
Pure speculation, but I suspect the future of Twitter is safe, one way or another.
