Has Twitter learned anything from the Dot-com bust?

Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, hedges a bit when asked what is Twitter's revenue model in this video from the Web 2.0 Summit.  He does acknowledge that they are working on the product and the quality of the product will influence revenue. Ok. Start with a good product that people really want and build customers. This was a good step for Twitter and one that was not taken by many revenue-less dot-com companies. However, there still needs to be a revenue model. Most of the companies that provide free services have revenue: Gmail/Google Search, Facebook/Advertising, etc. Twitter cannot survive on VC money forever. I find it a bit disconcerting that the CEO, who is responsible for the strategic and conceptual aspects of the operation, cannot even articulate how they will make money. Are they working on partnerships (one was announced today with Bing) and cannot disclose it. Or do they truly believe that building a great product MUST somehow eventually lead to making money?

Is email really dead?

Wall St. Journal has an interesting article on the demise of email. The growth of other digital communication channels like Twitter and Facebook have slowed the growth of email. The article rationalizes that email worked the way we used to work: logging onto the Internet and checking things; newer technologies work the way we now work: always connected via computers and mobile devices.

The article also provides a metaphor that information is like a constant stream (or river) which things are placed into. From an enterprise standpoint, I do not think email is going anywhere. The value of email is that you can schedule a time to read and answer it. Millenials might be used to instantly responding to messages and thus email is tough for them. That might work for students. But when these students get into the workplace and need an hour to write a report, they are going to find out how inconvenient it is to answer an IM or read a bunch of tweets while trying to focus on an important assignment.

Multitasking, you argue? Psychologists have proven the brain is incapable of true multitasking. We simply split our capacity among activities we are doing. This has pretty much been proven by driving behind anyone who is in a serious cell phone conversation while attempting thought-related driving maneuvers.

The article makes several assumption or omission errors. First, there is a document trail which Twitter and Facebook do not leave behind, especially important for the enterprise. Second, anything large and mature is not going to experience huge growth because it is alread large and mature, leaving it with less room to grow (duh). We saw this when e-commerce became a mature technology/industry. The article does not address the role of spam and efforts to control it on growth, either.

I think Twitter (and enterprise one-to-many technologies like yammer) will supplant some email. I think Facebook and direct messaging through Facebook will also have an effect on email growth. The value to these technologies is that they will provide a more seamless and transparent interaction between work and play. Technology has wrought a rather negative effect on the work/play relationship, possibly these communication channels can improve that relationship. But email going dead in the enterprise in favor of Twitter? Doubt it. The article has a great quote that provokes some thought,

"You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it."

These technologies, email included, should increase productivity. Checking multiple channels and responding to business and personal communication in real-time will not improve productivity...unless people meld their work and play together into one virtual lifestyle. Don't agree with my? Leave a comment...I'll check it when I check my email.

Am I alone in my concern for traditional media?

FastCompany has an article about Rupert Murdoch criticizing Google for aggregating news. It is easy to take pot shots at the traditional media and people like Murdoch who create traditional content. Their unwillingness to embrace Web 2.0 and their slowly decaying model of print journalism does make them look antiquated.

Let's not forget, however, that people like Murdoch still have a viable revenue model for news and he stills pays journalists who fact check and seek confirming sources. In the late 1990's the courts prevented aggregators from showing a newspaper website site and wrapping their own advertisements around it. This is different, but not much. Google is certainly going to put ads on content which Murdoch companies developed. How would you feel if this was your news company?

I am no protectionist. But I see a big problem with the demise of traditional news companies. Bloggers do not fact check, bloggers do not get two sources, and bloggers forward on dubious stories because they have no way of confirming them. If we are left to bloggers for news we will lose investigative journalism (what's left of it) and accurate reporting. Our "news" will become a webmash of rumor, innuendo, and gossip.

If companies like Murdoch's cannot get paid for developing quality content, then we will all suffer. Won't it be ironic when the wide, open, and free distribution provided by the 'Net destroys the quality of the content we seek to distribute?