[dasil003]

Yeah, or protesters and celebrities. It could actually be anyone and celebrities, because you only see the groups that you participate in, and the only one with global visibility are, duh, celebrities!

I think Twitter's biggest problem is lack of vision and a commitment to that vision. Going public was a big mistake for them, because Wall Street has no concept of what makes technology good or interesting over the long haul, they can only reduce things to the most simplistic metrics. Facebook is pretty much a known quantity at this point, and is the biggest social network that has ever existed. So now everyone wants to measure Twitter by the Facebook yardstick. But Facebook only has 5 times as many active users as Twitter, and I would bet money that the average Twitter user is more than 5 times as influential as the average Facebook user. If you can't build a viable company with 300M of the most influential users, then something is very very wrong in the world.

The biggest tell-tale for me is that everyone knows exactly what Facebook is, and many people (especially younger ones) see it as a crufty accumulation of old friends and family that they have no interest engaging with. But for Twitter there's still a majority of people who "don't get it", and yet it has been a revolution for celebrities and the aforementioned groups in terms of what it's done for the public conversation. To me this is all an indication that Twitter has way more upside than Facebook. In fact, I'd be willing to invest in Twitter if I thought their leadership was strong, but my big concern is that they don't have a clear vision, and therefore they will get picked apart by the clueless hand-wringing of Wall Street until they become so cheap that Google or Facebook snaps them up.

[jerf]

"If you can't build a viable company with 300M of the most influential users, then something is very very wrong in the world."

One of the intriguing thing I'm keeping my eye on is that if TWTR keeps sinking, will there be any other follow-up effects? Because if TWTR can't convert eyeballs to money at the Wall Street-expected rate, that suggests in that invester-sphinctor-tightening way that maybe the other companies depedent on that model may have trouble too.

The market's faith in eyeballs ---advertising---> money has always struck me as excessively strong. Not that it's a stupid idea, just that Wall Street seems to believe it's about 5-10 times more effective a plan than I do.