Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Twitter Shakes Outbound SMS, Needs Business Model

Re: Twitter Shakes Outbound SMS, Needs Business Model

adam — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:14:57 -0000

I would have advertiser funded it.

Re: Twitter Shakes Outbound SMS, Needs Business Model

Burak — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:12:37 -0000

They could charge a low-cost subscription fee for power users, with an ad-based model for people who want to follow up to, say, 50 friends for free.

Re: Twitter Shakes Outbound SMS, Needs Business Model

Nicole Simon (Berlin, Germany) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:31:25 -0000

The biggest problem I see (at least for the German market): We do not pay for simple SMS receiving, ever. The idea ot get a text message and pay for it is associated with the likes of ringtones and similar.

Also, while DM per SMS is nice (which is the feature I assume most people really use and not having everything delivered to their mobile) it is doable by mobile internet. That could be an angle to work it, but mobile phone providers are not interested in small apps with low footprint, as it does not bring in money.

To give you a reference: I use twitter extensivly through a prepaid data plan when in Germany for 24 Euro cents a mb and made barely 3 megabytes since last christmas. Not much to get there.

Re: Twitter Shakes Outbound SMS, Needs Business Model

Palin Ningthoujam — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:31:09 -0000

How about charging the application developers? There are so many Twitter applications. But that alone might not suffice. Ads on messages and time lines might be big eyesores.

Re: Twitter Shakes Outbound SMS, Needs Business Model

Palin Ningthoujam — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:29:39 -0000

I think it could be a nice idea. And mobile phone operators today are open to all sort of marketing campaigns and have huge budgets, it might just work.

Re: Twitter Shakes Outbound SMS, Needs Business Model

Mark Zabala — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:21:42 -0000

Twitter should just replace the failwhale (which I see all the time anyway) with relevant ads based on the context of a user tweets. It can display the ad based on a keywords that appear in user's last tweet, last few tweet, average of all time tweets, what keywords are appearing in a user's time, and the most popular trending keywords in Summize.

What about via SMS and and Twitter clients? Well, each user can have a mandatory "friend" like Tim on Myspace that will tweet relevant ads based on keywords targeted per user that only tweets in a proportionate ratio to how often a user tweets and their friends tweet so there is a decent signal to noise ratio.

Do I win a prize? =)

Re: Twitter Shakes Outbound SMS, Needs Business Model

Kurt Henninger — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:11:13 -0000

I agree that all Internet ventures eventually have to come up with a viable business model, or they will go down the tubes.

Unfortunately, many Internet ventures get started without a viable business model and get lots of traffic, but are never able to capitalize on that traffic without a good model.

Re: Twitter Shakes Outbound SMS, Needs Business Model

Nicolai Rygh — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:08:02 -0000

Maybe their business plan is to grow and grow; until microsoft or google put the cash on the table to buy them?

Re: Twitter Shakes Outbound SMS, Needs Business Model

willandbeyond — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:55:14 -0000

I have no doubt that they are working on a business model, but it's true, the clock is ticking and they need to step it up.