Chris Pirillo was hosting a live call on Ustream.tv when an earthquake hit in Mexico. The word got around on Twitter, Scoble blogged about it, and within minutes, there were over 60 people on the call. Then Chris pulled in a caller from Mexico using Skype video.
Update:
More video from earlier in the call here and here. And a video from later in the night here.
A local news station in San Francisco (KPIX) ran a story tonight on Twitter. Robert Scoble (PodTech) and Biz Stone are featured in the video.
Update:
This story is no longer available on the KPIX web site. Here’s a video that I took when it aired back in March 2007.
First off, if they ever go in this direction, Twitter needs to be very careful with how they go about it or else they will lose their loyal users. Maybe they could add a preference setting that allows you to filter out posts related to buying and selling items, similar to the new Filtering feature on Flickr. They might also want to offer a Mature filter to keep out the seedy stuff. I could see some very cool mobile applications built around this. Imagine going to a sold out Arcade Fire show and using Twitter on your mobile phone to find people who are trying to unload unused tickets at the last minute within 0.5 miles of the venue. I would use that.
How would Twitter make money on this? They could charge the seller a fee for showing the For Sale tweet in a prominent location. Or go the craigslist route and charge a fee for real estate listings, job postings, etc.
12/29/2008 Update:
A service called Tweebay just launched a few days ago. They allow you to post items for sale on Twitter. I haven’t had a chance to look at it closely yet but it looks like an interesting concept.
Today Steve Rubel points out that Twitter is probably racking up SMS fees on the international tweets. He also points out that the site does not appear to be monetized now and that could be a problem. So building on my Future of Twitter post from yesterday, let’s look at how Twitter might monetize a partnership with a big company. Take the Starbucks example. Let’s assume that there are 20,000 people on Twitter who have added Starbucks as a Friend in order to get a few promotions a week – e.g. a free cookie with your coffee, a free tall coffee, etc. If Twitter charged Starbucks a few cents per tweet per follower, the revenue from Starbucks might looks something like this:
20,000 followers
10 tweets (promotions) per week
$.05 cents per tweet for each follower (maybe more???)
that’s $10 K per week or about $40K per month
If you sign up 100-200 companies doing something similar then we’re talking some real revenue. Probably more than enough to offset those international SMS fees.
Last night I listened to an interview that net@nite did with Twitter founder Evan Williams from earlier this month. Towards the end of the interview he talked about ways that they might monetize the Twitter platform in the future. The example that he gave was a movie promotion where you could follow the “tweets” of a character in an upcoming movie. This got me to thinking about where Twitter is going. I’m not saying I’m agreeing with the commercialization of Twitter, but how much longer will be it be until your Twitter page looks something like this?
5/29/2007 Update:
Delta Airlines is on Twitter now.
6/4/2007 Update:
Read/Write Web spotted Amazon.com on Twitter.
7/13/2007 Update:
JetBlue (one of the companies that I used as an example in my original post) is on Twitter now.