Re: Using twitter as an outage notification

[Marshall Eubanks <tme () americafree tv>]

On Jul 5, 2009, at 6:12 AM, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 05, 2009, Roland Perry wrote:
>
> > Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news  
> > means
> > it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify  
> > paying
> > more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half  
> > hour
> > event.
>
> Is Twitter making a profit or not?

The word on the street is that they have not yet "found a revenue  
model". In other words,
they make no money. They seem very dot com 1.0 unconcerned with this.  
That obviously cannot last.

The speculation on how to fix that tend to be either focused advertising

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_ultimate_twitter_revenue_model.php

ecommerce

http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/2009/6/22/A-real-Twitter-revenue-model---gasp-_731.aspx

or Google type data mining models (you can detect trends very
quickly on twitter). These can obviously be combined; who knows if  
they would be sufficient.

> This discussion about (ab)using a publicly available message system  
> which
> isn't currently being charged for would makes me worried^Wamused as  
> hell.

I don't think it violates the terms of use. But, yes, as I said  
before, this is
a service that goes down. I would not rely on it as the only way to  
communicate.

> (Not that I can't see possible ways of making money off twitter -  
> especially
> if you offer reliable message dissemination services to companies  
> for a fee,
> but AFAIK they aren't doing this at the moment.)

No. I haven't even heard this mentioned as a possible revenue model.  
Good idea, though.

Regards
Marshall


> Adrian

Regards
Marshall Eubanks
CEO / AmericaFree.TV