Successful Projects

On Sunday Patrick May posted an article on The Mercury News titled, We’re connecting – and wasting time – on Twitter. It’s a very insightful article on Twitter in general, its growth in popularity and how some users are utilizing it to get/share information and to conduct business.

The opening line of the article is, “Some have called Twitter “the ‘Seinfeld’ of the Internet – a Web site about nothing.” This is so true. Yet another hugely popular bit of geek technomasturbation with no real business model, no definable usage model but with a following of millions (1.2 million unique visitors in May according to Patrick) of loyal/addicted fans/followers/fanatics. I would love it if my application had this kind of following.

Apparently Twitter are trying out ads on the Japanese version of their site in an attempt to find a revenue model. The problem with any revenue model at Twitter is stated quite eloquently by Jere,iah Owyang of Forrester Research – “to expect everyone to use
this tool is very unlikely; it will be for only a small percentage of
Internet users. And it will absolutely have competition, once the cell
phone industry figures out another way to enhance their text-messaging
systems and charge for it.”

There it is in a nut shell. Few will use it and the ones who do aren’t typically the types to pay a lot of money for a service that really isn’t that much more valuable than SMS. All of that not withstanding Twitter is a phenomenon albeit a time sucking somewhat useless one.

The lesson is: 1) Whatever you’re building try like hell to make it crack-like in its appeal to your target user audience and, 2) make sure the appeal is as broad as possible and that you’ve thought of a business/revenue model that can/will capitalize on the ferocity of your users passion about your thing.