Not that Twitter didn't already have enough spam.... Die twitter die

Thank you for your helpful remark; I'm sure it will move the conversation forward.

What, you don't try to generate revenue if you're interested in being acquired? What kind of 1990s mentality is that?!

here's their twitter 101 guide and search widget:

When people working in the Empire State Building twittered that they were craving ice cream delivery, New York local chain Tasti D Lite was there to listen and meet their need. When electronics buyers look for good deals, the Dell Outlet Twitter account helps them save money with exclusive coupons. When Houston's coffee drinkers decide where to get their daily dose, many choose Coffee Groundz, which lets them order via Twitter. Read on to learn what Twitter is and to get detailed examples of how companies are using it. On these pages, we’ll also reveal how Twitter can help your business right now.

twitter101 [business.twitter.com]

Customize Your Search Widget [twitter.com]

CWebguy's statement has a basis in reality. Twitter is at the center of a Snake Oil Industry selling tools, ebooks, money making secrets and services purported to help individuals with no Internet experience earn piles of cash.

Recent events surrounding the hacking of Twitter has revealed that the management of Twitter is naive and even stupid, yes stupid. How else to explain that the access to one of their databases consisted of the first name of one of the founders and a password that is equally easy to guess?

Twitter's step into the Get Rich with Twitter cesspool confirms either how naive Twitter management is, or its cynicism. They should have done this awhile ago before the scammers took control of the conversation. With any luck they can reclaim it, their chances are probably better than Squidoo.

I wonder if the house cleaning that twitter did overnight is related to this. I woke up with 50 fewer followers today. Twitter blog said it was done to get rid of spammers.

CWebguy's statement has a basis in reality. Twitter is at the center of a Snake Oil Industry selling tools, ebooks, money making secrets and services purported to help individuals with no Internet experience earn piles of cash.

Thank you Martini ;) I should also provide a link to the most recent article that said something like 90% of the content on Twitter was provided by 1-10% of the population on Twitter, hmmmm Just thinking outside the box.

But good thing for Twitter is they get free advertising, (CNN, Foxnews, major personalities, Ashton Kutcher, etc.)

martinibuster and CWebguy are saying exactly what I've said numerous times. Twitter is basically non-stop updating of your Facebook profile, only useful when you want to tell people what you (or your business is doing) without revealing personal information. However, a corporate blog can be a lot better for business and Facebook is much better for personal use. If you really don't want to disclose too much information there is always blogspot, wordpress etc. It's also not very difficult to write a program that simply writes a line of text on a webpage. I just really can't see the purpose of Twitter and I am not new to either business or the internet. I've spent way too much time thinking about Twitter and I truly give up. Please, anyone who does like Twitter, tell me one thing that Twitter is either the best or easiest way to do any particular task. In terms of Twitter making money, how? Nobody clicks ads on Web 2.0 sites. MySpace, FaceBook, Digg, YouTube etc. get VERY few ads clicks relative to their traffic as well as bandwidth, electricity, and other overhead costs.

Per an article in Newsweek, maybe Facebook, YouTube and Twitter could all use an education themselves:

Why good websites shouldn't be free [webmasterworld.com]

Wait for it, wait for it... There it is!

Within an hour of launching this new guide it will be exploited, automated and wrapped up in various make money online websites.

If there's anything to learn online it's that automated incomes tend to be temporary with diminishing returns, it takes a surprising amount of work to be lazy!

I wish I could be more optimistic but even the most well meaning guides become fodder to automated get rich quick schemes.

"The documents included a company forecast Twitter would take in $4 million by the fourth quarter of 2009, and grow to 5,200 employees and 1 billion users by the end of 2013."

$769.23 per employee... is that profit or revenue? Either way it's disgustingly low.

5200 employees for twitter?

I don't know what's more astonishing, that forecast or Twitter giving "How to make money" advice.

I wonder what MySpace's forecasts were way back when.

You can't look 4 years into the future on the internet and accurately predict anything...it's just not going to happen. All it would take is something new to come along and Twitter gets pushed away like the fad it is.

$769.23 per employee... is that profit or revenue? Either way it's disgustingly low.

So unless they all work out of their spare bedrooms and have no other expenses, Twitter is way losing money, yet feel qualified to tell other people how to make money.

Maybe I'll open a twitter account and tweet about the wonders of irony.

Jane_Doe, and no salary... but let's assume an average $40,000 a year salary, that's a loss of $204,000,000 at least, not counting anyone who will have a higher salary than that, server costs, bandwidth, electricity, rent, other office costs, legal expenses etc.

Why are we the only ones who sees how crazy this is?

Who in their right mind throws money at this?

$769.23 per employee

That was $4 million in 2009, the 5,200 employee forecast was 2013.

The numbers Twitter are targeting by the end of 2013: 1 billion users, $1.54 billion in revenue, 5,200 employees and $1.1 billion in net earnings.

I should also provide a link to the most recent article that said something like 90% of the content on Twitter was provided by 1-10% of the population on Twitter.

It was here. As discussed, 10% is a fairly normal distribution.

[webmasterworld.com ]

If you want all your spam followers back instantly, just include a tweet with #MLM [twitter.com] in it. They come out of the woodwork like maggots in a downpour.

It seems that Twitter's concept of monetizing their own company is clearly going to involve sourcing funds from companies wishing to exploit the Twitter community.

So, they are trying to speed along the development of that market for themselves, by "educating" folk as to the benefits and how to optimize returns.

Of course, as soon as money starts changing hands in the future, they will have to have some sort of statistics output to allow said companies to track the return on their investment, a la Adwords. Only then will the true results be visible and Twitter hype tested.

Mr. Twitter

I already know to make money online. How about you?

Please, anyone who does like Twitter, tell me one thing that Twitter is either the best or easiest way to do any particular task.

1) Sending an SMS-alert out to all your friends, quickly.
2) Enabling chat between a number of geographically-remote people some of whom have access to a computer, others who only have access to a mobile phone.
3) Finding real-time eye-witness reports of events in the news.
4) Building a large following in days rather than months.

I'm sure there are many other things that Twitter does better than anything else.

Like search engines or any media vehicle in the early days, it just takes a while for things to sort out. With Twitter it's easy to ignore the spam since you only see stuff if you choose to follow. Why pay any attention to your followers aka, MLM :) ) You'll never see stuff you have no interest in unless you choose to.

It is great for all the things @ronin mentioned. Like anything else, it will be (and is) a good business vehicle for those that put in the time and figure out how to use it. Whatever Twitter publishes for businesses will be used with great success by some and will be used by many others that don't really have anything to offer but dreams of quick cash.

If you started the search game in the early days by building real sites offering real value focused on connecting people with what they were looking for, chances are you're doing pretty well today. Twitter can compliment that well.

Time will tell how well Twitter can monetize.

My brother made a comment about this earlier that I'd like to share. $1.54 billion in revenue works out to 15.4 billion spam tweets assuming a generous dime a tweet. It more likely would work out to 154 billion spam tweets if it settles closer to a penny per tweet which it probably would.

He said that if nobody is asking to be sent spam (advertising, offers etc) messages it may not even be legal to do without permission.

Is twitter immune to anti spam laws ?

Ronin, you wrote "3) Finding real-time eye-witness reports of events in the news." I wonder if Twitter is partly behind the AP's latest "registry" move. Seems plausible.

There is this guy tweeting . . .

"Just arrived at the airport"
"Taking off"
"About to land"
"Landed a few minutes ago"
"Waiting for a taxi"

. . . and in between one interesting link to a New york times article.

I liked the article a lot, but can't understand why I should follow every move he makes. And oh, I could stop following him, but so will I end up not following 90% of the people I follow.

I don't want to let twitter go just yet, but I just don't see the big picture here.

@JS_Harris Hadn't thought of that, but it might be a factor.

@Habtom I like to remain agnostic towards Twitter on the whole.

But it seems to me that those on Twitter who follow others regardless of how much boring trivia they churn out are rather like those who will go out to a disco and then throw themselves around to whatever Tiesto or Trentemoller mix the DJ lines up next, regardless of whether they actually like it or not (perhaps in the hope that the next mix will be better?)

This is no good at all.

Empty floors educate DJs. Sparse followings educate Twitterers. At least we can hope so.

If you stop following Trivia Tim because his noise-to-signal ratio is too high and if everyone else does the same one of three things will happen:

1) Trivia Tim will give up on Twitter: nobody wins and nobody loses.
2) Trivia Tim will persist with Twitter but no-one's listening: everyone wins except poor Tim, wasting his time tweeting into the ether, who loses.
3) Trivia Tim will be perceptive to the implicit feedback from his ex-followers and his signal-to-noise ratio will improve: everybody wins.

Of course this all requires people to pro-actively prune their Twitter follow-lists... and I suspect that the path-of-least-resistant aspect of human nature will see that as "too much trouble."

This is a good thing.

@ronin is on it, as usual.

To extend and amplify his list of what Twitter does best, I offer this narrative:

I have 360ish followers. Two of them, whom I also follow, live in my hometown. They're serious foodies who are followed by a nationwide network of folks with like interests.

I'm rarely in Atlanta; but circumstances lead me to spend an unscheduled night there. All I have with me by way of electronics is my (distinctly NOT "smart") cell phone.

I tweet:

Can anyone recommend a Thai restaurant in #ATL? Please RT. TIA, Twitterverse!

Inside of 20 minutes I have a dozen responses, some unmediated from folks who monitor the Twitter stream for the #ATL hashtag (airport codes abbreviate locations for brevity), some relayed by my homies/foodies whose retweets have gotten the ear of their peers in Atlanta.

Called "crowdsourcing," methinks. Works *brilliantly!*

>>Please, anyone who does like Twitter, tell me one thing that Twitter is either the best or easiest way to do any particular task

Twitter is a community in which you choose with whom you want to interact. I wouldn't look at Twitter as a solution to a problem so much as a way of interacting with others. This may be fun, or it may be productive.

On a recent trip to Dallas to give a speech, my suitcase was lost by the airline. I posted a lament (not expecting a solution, just wanting to rant) and a local follower offered to take me shopping or otherwise help out. I forged ahead in my rumpled blazer, but it was a nice feeling knowing that if I had been in a bind help was at hand.