You, my friend read iBankCoin daily, therefore it is a requirement that by the time you finish up and close your browser, your stock/financial/company IQ will be significantly higher than the inferior average person. Yes, your frequent visits to iBC will equip you with the knowledge and swagger to dominate every conservation about stocks…
Friend: Hey man, I bought some IBM stock.
You: What a coincidence. I gave a monkey a pencil and he circled that same stock too.
…You should be able to shout out the CEOs of products that your friends try to introduce you to….
Friend: Dude, have you seen Google Earth? It’s way trippy man. I think I can see my car!
You: Oh, you mean the product of Eric E. Schmidt who invested in Matthew O’Connell‘s GeoEye-1 high-resolution commercial imaging satellite to send back images to Google’s mapping system? I heard a little about. In fact I installed it on my grandma’s BlackBerry Bold. Can you even get Google Earth on your Razor?
And of course, by reading iBC you will [unfortunately] be able to wow that nerdy girl with hairy legs that sits in front of you in your discrete-mathematics class by telling her all the different companies that built each component of your iPhone.
Unpleasantly looking hairy woman: Hey, I like your iPhone. Can I touch it?
You: My friend has a Razor, I think you should touch that instead. And I’m not talking about a Motorola.
Hot girl: Hey nice phone. Can I touch it?
You: Sure! Did you know BroadCom (BRCM) makes the components to support that touchscreen? And a little company named SkyWorks (SWKS) handles the power amplification for the receiver? It’s amazing stuff. I love amazing stuff… So, Miss Amazing, tell me about your components.
Hot girl: Ew. Get away from me you creepy nerd.
So anyway, that got me thinking about more popular products that people are using, but don’t know a thing about them. I mean, people, your friends, your girlfriends, relatives… whatever … they all see a product, but they only look at them from a consumer’s point of view. We here look at something, dissect it, and tell you all about that company’s revenues, shoddy accounting principles, CEOs, and market potential. So let’s get to it and talk a little about Twitter and FaceBook, two products that are becoming household names.
Twitter vs FaceBook
So let me ask you this? Who is the founder of Twitter? If you say Howard Lindzon I will throw a pineapple at your face. The answer is Jack Dorsey, some software engineer who did what every other software engineer wish they did- simply create a giant chatroom and SMS-messaging-of-the-internet technology. See! You’re smarter already. In February 2009, Twitter ranked 3rd in social networking sites, trailing MySpace (2) and FaceBook (1). I’m pretty sure they’re #1 now. FaceBook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg… his last name is much cooler and easier to remember. I wonder why.
Can They Be Profitable?
I do have a twitter (“thehawaiitrader”), but not a FaceBook, so maybe I’m biased here, but I think Twitter actually has a better chance at making revenue than FaceBook. The problem with Twitter though is that it’s all just a game to many people. But to me, within the game, I see Twitter accomplishing what Google’s Search Engines cannot do… accessing consumer demand on the spot! That’s very valuable content, and if Google doesn’t understand that, they are behind the curve. Google matches ads with a user’s search, but Twitter has the ability to match ads with user’s conversations, thoughts, and other streams of conscious. Here are some examples…
- Let’s say you tweet, “I’m hungry”, you could get a number of replies from local restaurants with links to their latest deals, special of the day, buy-1-get-1 free kind of stuff. There’s actually a lunch wagon in LA that serves Korean-Tacos, and they tweet the location of their wagon every night! Crowds of people flock there. It’s hilarious, but we’re all jealous.
- Let’s say you tweet, “Was Taken a good movie?”, then NFLX can send a response telling you when the movie is available and if you want to add it to your cue.
- Customer relations: Every company in America will soon have their own Twitter account, with some PR girl in charge of sifting through tweets to find people talking about their products, then proceed to offer assistance.
- Content is probably the most valuable thing here. If you use Twitter analytics you can track what people are talking about right now. What’s on their minds, what they hate and what they want. I’m sure companies, and even Google, could profit from that.
(this is the lunch-wagon that tweets their location! sheesh. Go Kogi-BBQ!)
What about FaceBook, can they be profitable? I’m just not convinced with them. It reminds me of Ringo, or MySpace. In fact, it reminds me of a photo-album. Posting pictures of families doesn’t tell a supplier much. It’s not quite as ground-breaking as YouTube, so if any of the big boys were to go shopping, they’ll probably pick Twitter over FaceBook. Then again, I could be wrong, it looks like there already is some shopping going on for the Face… Digital Sky Technologies of Russia, offered about $200 million for some p-stock. Russia? What’s in Russia? I thought all they have there is snow and snow and, more snow. A bunch of profile pictures of fur-hoodies and ear-muffs.
Threats, Evil Threats
Both Twitter and FaceBook have the daunting task of staying as a perceived necessity, and not fade into the background as a trendy item of 2009. This is real hard to do, I mean look at Napster. Great product, but bad managing and PR, and AAPL just came along and stole their idea and gave the world iTunes… a monster sized cash cow for Steve. That copy-cat threat exists strongly for FaceBook; Twitter has to worry about fraud, fake Twitter accounts (like “KanyeWest”), and spam.
With that said, if Twitter ever goes public, don’t expect it to be an instant home-run, but looks worth a try. Shoot, I’d buy. More importantly, I do think this social-media phenomenon we are experiencing is what will change the face of consumer activity drastically in the near future. You can be sure companies everywhere are tuned to that.
Aloha!
http://twitter.com/thehawaiitrader
Facebook is trying so hard to be like Twitter, with all these status-updates. It’s a weak attempt, Facebook struggles.
dang it, fig
or shall i say gig
Apples and oranges, my friend, apples and oranges.
Comparing the two is a fairly futile, yet an incomprehensibly popular thing to do nowadays. Twitter is Facebook boiled down to status-updates. The two’s scale, accessibility (public vs. private), and information provided are vastly different.
They both get lumped under ‘social-networking’ so I guess the comparisons are inevitable…but saying that one will survive while the other will die out as a consequence is like saying that texting will make phone calls obsolete.
Twitter = CB radios of 1970s.
Hear that, good buddy?
DPeezy, I think what he is saying is that one is more likely to get successfully monetized than the other.
A lot of long time facebook users I have talked to think that twitter is stupid, although they don’t use twitter. I told them I think Facebook is gay, and that I use twitter to actually get some shit accomplished at work sometimes. I dislike Facebook because other people put my pictures up on their stupid pages for everyone to see. Remember next time your in a picture it will be on Facebook.
Excellent commentary and work. For a “non-techie”, I thoroughly enjoyed this post.
However, personally, I see no need for FaceBook, and Twitter is akin to a virtual, electronic ball and chain.
Calling them “tweets”, or whatever, is just a softer word for bursts of irrelevant communication: “Going to throw a frisbee with my dog”….wow, that’s really interesting!
Off to eat meat and fire off a few more rounds…., which I won’t twit, tweet, or whatever for the masses.
The A-Dawgg is anti-social, sorry.
LOL: Twitter = CB radios
Hope that doesn’t lead to a L’il Wayne remix of that “Convoy” song.
sorry this is long, but I know what I’m talking about.
very different models, very different usage time frames
facebook has a much more serious database of consumer preferences. its database is sellable for its interests-correlation information. the apps and API have mostly brought stupid things of little use.
twitter is essentially anonymous or self-promotional or networking. twitter has real-time search and the API has brought interesting apps that twitter themselves wouldn’t have thought of. the company seems clueless about monetizing it. more likely that the companies that use it will monetize successfully and eventually twitter will be owned like youtube is owned (who lose $450 mill a month!). 140 chars, minimal interface ? the worst place to put ads on the whole net.
on facebook people confess to their interests, post about films, music, what shows they are going to. campaigns spread virally but they are limited by the friend-to-friend transmission. there is no public space in facebook and no public broadcast. the ads are very targeted. I doubt they make much off the ads. facebook can and does sell profile statistics to companies that can leverage that. the BIG problem facebook has is that the community is suspicious as hell. facebook has backers with fucked up politics and yes, CIA connections. they really are looking at this as a way to get massive user-volunteered profile and consumer information and that is highly marketable. most of us lie about all our personal data.
honestly the only reason people are there is because it replaces every high school / college / job reunion. seriously facebook destroyed the reunion industry. I made fun of it for a long time (myspace is much grimier and fucked up — hence its way better for yout’ culture) but eventually got tugged in because I’m in contact with friends on 4 continents. if you are not inside facebook and connected to lots of friends then its very weak. it only became interesting when I passed that threshold. once you go past a critical point then it really is socializing. I have some very smart friends who I was out of touch with for years, now its as though we hang out in the same coffee house every day.
2 weeks ago I found out — on facebook — that an important ex-girlfriend of mine died. I had recently got to talk to her again — thru facebook. her family found out about the accident — on facebook. sigh. pictures of the memorial on the beach posted.
in short: the communication on facebook is personal and is truly about friends.
myspace is for promoting music. nobody likes myspace, but its still huge in the music industry. they probably make more in ads than anybody else.
twitter is for trading information and posting links. many people aren’t using the web interface. so selling ads is a non-starter. its rapidly turning into a programming eco-system. look at all the apps and leveraged uses of it. google really was interested because it does have real time search.
IRC was the CB of the internet back before the web came along and all you losers showed up to spoil it.
tldr: the value of all of these services depends on who you are connected to. without friends, they are useless. I get my mind blown every day because my friends are really intelligent and post well.
twitter is public posting, knowing that the whole world might read it.
facebook is layers of connections and chambers. lots of privacy controls.
the Fax machine was also useless until they got enough of them out there.
twitter will go the way of instant messaging, and email before that: easy concept to replicate, few barriers, easy to decentralize, fractured among providers, many open source implementations (seeing that already), companies will set up internal “twitter-like” system, etc. Easy to gateway messages to/from the “real” Twitter if needed. The twitter “brand” is currently a fad, but it will fade and the concept will live on. You don’t need Twitter, Inc. to post 140-char updates somewhere. All those “data mining” examples you put out can be done ANYWHERE people are chatting in real time.
Yeah, this is just a shitty implementation of IRC with more hype.
Facebook is a little stickier, more of a walled garden, I’d bet on that to make $$.
@passerby was thinking that too : twitter is such a minimal concept that they can’t evolve and they can be ripped in a minute. I’m already sick of the 140 char haiku game tho its made 4 interesting poetry.
last.fm might get ripped too, tho I like their style and business model and they have a good music fan community. they are owned by CBS who recently screwed them over by sending user’s data including IP addresses to the RIAA (mp3 player pings what track is playing back to last.fm server => real time charts)
problem with twitter is that all the posts just … disappear. its so ephemeral. the internet is usually about compounding content.
understands: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/
Russia? What’s in Russia? I thought all they have there is snow and snow and, more snow.
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ha-ha-ha! you are sooo mistaken my american friend!
I can see you from my backyard!