Comments on: Twitter’s Dearth of Deals

By: A Shopping List for Twitter | Twitterrati

A Shopping List for Twitter | Twitterrati — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:19:58 +0000

[...] new Twitter Obsession – including mine – is what acquisitions should Twitter make to further establish itself as the leading [...]

By: Will

Will — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 05:16:03 +0000

Not sure if Twitter is that averse to acquisitions at the end of the day. In fact, I think their only business model at present is acquiring companies. The biggest deal they have made since buying Summize was buying bit.ly. There was no cash exchange; they gave bit.ly shares of Twitter in lieu of money. This is "unofficial," but it's fairly obvious that this happened. The only big tech blog to report this for some reason was ReadWriteWeb. They noticed that Bit.ly was moving its servers and other miscellaneous office supplies into Twitter's offices. The other tech blogs just said Twitter was setting bit.ly to default and refused to reveal that bit.ly had been rewarded shares of Twitter.

If I'm Twitter, and I'm playing the M&A Roulette game, then I'm going all in. That is, I'm not worrying about how I'm going to sell ads on Twitter or turn Twitter into a "freemium model" website. The only thing I'm worrying about is getting registered users and growing traffic. This process of course would entail acquiring companies, sometimes in less obvious ways.

So, Twitter does have a business model. It's put ALL your thinking and resources into growing traffic and acquiring companies–sometimes in secret if you can–and then spin the roulette wheel. And I think it will probably work. It's going to be bought for $700 million or so in the next 3-4 months.

By: Will

Will — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:43:21 +0000

Hahah. That would funny. Facebook should buy them itself.

By: Helen M Overland

Helen M Overland — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:16:36 +0000

It may be a simple case of analysis paralysis… twitter is so under the microscope that whatever they do is scrutinized. It could be that they're just so concerned about a mis-step that they're not sure what to do at all.

I'd love to see some kind of advertising model – and expect to see one in the next 12 -18 months, regardless of the hesitation on twitters part.

By: Mark Drapeau

Mark Drapeau — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:55:23 +0000

Why doesn't someone else just buy up all the good Twitter-based applications that Twitter isn't purchasing, bundle them up on the cheap and give it a name ("Ultimate Twitter Portal"), and then sell them to a competitor like Facebook?