Many times (here and elsewhere) I've stated my opinion that I believe Twitter to be ultimately doomed. It is being relegated to infrastructure (and thus will be commoditized in time) and (IMHO) it is floundering in finding a monetization model.
Don't get me wrong: they have an exceptionally long runway so this won't happen anytime soon but I think it will end up being acquired by the likes of Facebook, Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) or Apple.
I don't see a compelling reason for Facebook to buy Twitter other than to deny it to the other two (which could be compelling but given the direction of their stock price this seems like a hard sell to Twitter's investors and board).
Apple could marry its mobile ecosystem, particularly the messaging infrastructure, to Twitter and be a dominant player.
Google could do the same thing but I think Apple has the most to gain from picking up social assets (note: these opinions are strictly personal views).
Given that it makes sense for Apple to buy a stake in Twitter. Large(r) companies often do this. It's a poison pill. Take a large enough stake and you can make it more difficult for others to acquire that company and be int he box seat to be the acquirer if it should come to that.
I believe that if Twitter gives Apple, say a 10% or bigger stake, they are insuring an exit strategy if they can't continue to exist independently.
I beg to differ. Twitter is my primary source of real time information. In fact I go to find relevant information from people I follow from time to time. By the way, Twitter is very popular amongst younger generation.
Relegated to infrastructure?
They have users and they have eye-balls. That's what matters. By the way, don't forget promoted tweets are really working for them.
Fully agree. I don't 'Google', I 'Twitter'. Primarily through my feed of course but I use also Twitter search for all the topics I'm interested in but that are not covered by the accounts I follow. Exaggerated, but Google Search is slow compared to Twitter.
What if Twitter also indexes the web pages that are/were referred to by the links in the tweets and builds a Google like search page for that index. For example, the number of re-tweets and clicks can be used as input for the sort relevance. The result is a search engine that is crowed sourced combined with a robotic one and in real time. Combine "AdSense" and there you have it.
as soon as twitter starts using tweets for ranking link relevance, there will come the army of people trying to seo the ranking and leaving relevance in dust.
I think twitter is better with focusing on their core competency of providing real time information rather then being side tracked into something very different.
Apple's stake makes good sense because offers both backups and decreases reliance on others. For Twitter it gurantees a medium/eyeballs and for Apple content.
Good point, but Google also has to counter bad seo practices.
Twitter already has good anti spam algorithms and for this case they should be able to determine the quality of accounts and the quality of the tweets as well: age of an account, diversity of the tweets, hash tags, verified accounts, account linking to 3rd parties, re-tweets by other 'good' accounts, etc.
I think that such an offering would only extend and enhance their current competency since I'm already using Twitter like I used to Google to search for real time info. But I like Twitter to become better, more advanced and more relevant in search. I want to find the information referred to in tweets (blogs, news articles, videos, charts, etc) not only sorted by time, but sorted by quality as option. Hundreds of 'opinion' tweets with no links are less valuable. I don't want to wade through them.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Twitter decided to end the availability of their feed through Google Search?
Certainly its achievable but it would be a massive undertaking, before that they need to focus on retrieving some of those aged tweets and stopping the whales from taking over.
I do agree with your point about generally in having a more realtime and relevant serach engine. But I think instead of twitter some one working across networks would be in a better position.
bit.ly is going in this direction with its redesign and rt.ly and social sharing widgets like Addthis and Sharethis would also have a very good view of realtime data. That they could use.
The only advantage I could see with twitter is if they do sentiment analysis of the tweet text and then understand relevance. The context they have available could be akin to how google bot uses link title and anchor text but with 140characters more focused.
Twitter ending availability I think had more to do with google clearing space to forthcoming integration of g+
If they were to partner with Apple and EVERY app, band and movie in iTunes was seamlessly integrated with a corresponding Twitter page it could be huge. It would blunt the growth of Facebook pages and forever relegate Google+ to the geek community.
Between twitter and google+, I'd say google+ is the one with mass appeal. It's simply better for what people call "social" - sharing updates, sharing photos/albums, chat/conversations etc all within their own private social group.
I think I wasn't clear enough there. Google+ is not more widely used than twitter NOW. There are a lot of people on Facebook who were formerly on Orkut, Myspace etc who've never had a twitter account and just don't GET twitter. If I had to pick the next facebook sized network, it would be Google+ and not twitter for that reason.
PS: I don't even believe the current growth/engagement numbers coming out of twitter entirely. There's a lot more spammy accounts there than used to be that put out hundreds of tweets a day and I wonder if that's heavily padding twitter's user growth currently. Most of my current followers are "fake". Same with my friends who aren't particularly famous. The statistics don't reflect this properly.
I remember seeing a study investigating the proportion of active accounts, vs. the number of dormant accounts. I think the study found that only about 20% of accounts were active. I can only imagine that the ratio of real accounts to automated accounts is far worse.
I also think that SV peeps use twitter at a far higher percentage than the real world, leading to very skewed perceptions.
Really? I know a lot of people around the world who use Twitter, ranging from notable authors to famous physicists to fashion designers to hockey sportswriters. G+ MIGHT get there but for now, I know far more variety of disciplines who actively use Twitter over G+ and Facebook.
Don't get me wrong: they have an exceptionally long runway so this won't happen anytime soon but I think it will end up being acquired by the likes of Facebook, Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) or Apple.
I don't see a compelling reason for Facebook to buy Twitter other than to deny it to the other two (which could be compelling but given the direction of their stock price this seems like a hard sell to Twitter's investors and board).
Apple could marry its mobile ecosystem, particularly the messaging infrastructure, to Twitter and be a dominant player.
Google could do the same thing but I think Apple has the most to gain from picking up social assets (note: these opinions are strictly personal views).
Given that it makes sense for Apple to buy a stake in Twitter. Large(r) companies often do this. It's a poison pill. Take a large enough stake and you can make it more difficult for others to acquire that company and be int he box seat to be the acquirer if it should come to that.
I believe that if Twitter gives Apple, say a 10% or bigger stake, they are insuring an exit strategy if they can't continue to exist independently.