That's in the short term of course. Twitpic is essentially a feature on top of Twitter and without Twitter, Twitpic wouldn't exist. In the end, if Twitter implemented picture hosting themselves, Twitpic would surely slowly die.
For me, the most amazing thing is the "time to hockey stick": Friday night he starts hacking, and by Monday it's getting blogged about and going viral. That is an amazingly short amount of time to build something people want. Most of us have to iterate a long time to achieve that.
That is one way to look at it but the headline says. 'Twitter makes nothing.' So the comment is about setting the record straight, not comparing business models.
I still dont know what to make of these deals. On the one hand: Twitter brought in good revenue. This is smart and shows the value in their data.
On the other hand: I personally feel Twitter's real value to an acquirer like MSFT or GOOG is the data. The rest of it is kind of gravy and it's only there to provide the data (ie- you need people posting things in order to have the search data). In short, GOOG basically got the value they needed out of Twitter for a measly 25 million dollars. Why would they ever acquire them at what's sure to be a number at least 40x that amount?... Except to make sure someone else doesn't hence cutting off their access to the data.
Yeah, they're just selling different levels of access to their data stream. Besides the firehose, they have streams of things like all links and retweets, which require some kind of partnership.
idk. Big money deals with a single or maybe 2 customers is insanely high risk.
How do we know how much they make from their deals? How do you know it's more than $5m?