This is the Final Tweet to End All Tweets.
Twitter is Over. This is Twitter’s End. There are No More Tweets.
(inspired by the eoti)
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There’s a great conversation at WPMU.org about how to make money using WordPress MU – James starts by noting that advertising doesn’t cover the hosting costs for a massively successful site, and goes into the various other ways in which they derive revenue, including selling extra features to paid users and selling custom plugins (that are not released under the GPL). In response, Jason acknowledges that WPMU is inherently costly to run and agrees that there must be a revenue tsream, and then goes on to argue that WPMU is really a service, not a product. Therefore to make money with WPMU, he reasons, you must provide a value-added service relative to the big free hosts like wordpress.com – such as custom themes. James replies with a lengthy argument defending the decision not to release plugins under the GPL.
I don’t have much to add aside from noting that since themes have long been released without GPL, there’s no reason that plugins should be any different, especially with themes like Thesis which are “frameworks” that really blur the line between a theme and a plugin. The same can be argued for Prologue, which I use as the front end to my WPMU install at Talk Islam. The “core functions” of WP are never used in themes or plugins, so I don’t think that argument applies (think about it – why would you want to duplicate core WP functionality? why would you even need to?)
Of course, part of the problem for monetization is that you are a victim of your own succcess. James’ monthly costs for the Edublogs network are assuredly far greater than mine for Talk Islam – I can only aspire to a fraction of his success (especially since I am not running Talk Islam as a business. not yet anyway). As such Talk Islam has only a handful of user blogs – most of the activity is on the front page (where the Prologue theme gives it a dynamic, Twitter-esque feel). My goal for Talk Islam is to incorporate the Buddypress functions and ultimately create a framework for a “community platform” that would be in a sense the successor to the Daily Kos style blog community, replicating many of the features but discarding things that are broken in my opinion (such as the way the recommended diaries list is dominated by a clique of the same voices and the same topics, with very rare original and fresh perspectives). It should be noted that Shai Sachs, a very talented Drupal hacker, is working on a drupal-based blog infrastructure project for the progressive political blogsphere, but I personally believe that wordpress MU is a better platform. With Talk Islam as a prototype, we can envision a package that already includes the buddypress integration and standard theme for frontpage and user blogs that an aspiring admin could simply download and have ready to go out of the box.
The real question for monetization is the scale. How many WPMU installs are on the scale of Edublogs? Very few, I wager – but there are probably thousands like mine where the entire install can be run off a standard Dreamhost account. At that scale, Adsense ads can indeed cover hosting costs and even a modest profit on the side – not enough to pay rent, but maybe enough for cable television. Or a Starbucks addiction.
I think therefore a model for monetization presents itself. Instead of trying to monetize a single WPMU install, you monetize a packaged installation that you distribute. That installation can have Adsense code sharing so that half the revenue from ads goes to the package developer (or all if the installer doesn’t have an adsense account, there would be a box for them to paste their adsense publisher ID if they have one). For any given WPMU install the revenue will be quite modest, probably on the order of a few dollars a month. But suppose that the package was installed a hundred times? a thousand? Especially since it isn’t you who are paying the hosting fees, its the person installing the package.
Of course this means we have only punted the monetization issue downstream. But for a small WPMU site operator, recouping hosting costs is a lot easier than for a big operation like Edublogs. Users can be asked for donations, charged fees for extra features, etc just as James and Jason described in their posts. These revenue sources will be much more lucrative at the smaller scale.
As a business model, none of the above really helps James out, unfortunately 
But then again, what if individual schools ran their own WPMU microsites using Edublogs software? (actually, they do.) In a sense the strategy above can be leveraged regardless of your size. All things considered, I’d rather be in James’ position of being too big
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This intriguing article for web entrepreneurs has a lot of useful information in it – particularly the interesting metric for assessing a companies value: 10 x (revenue – cost). However, in the course of the discussion he also makes an intriguing point about Google:
Google has one incredibly amazing business – keyword advertising. It relies on its own search service and deals with other search services and content partners for the audience that drives the keyword business. If you stripped that business out of Google, you’d probably have a business that has gross revenues of $20bn, net revenues of $13bn, and operating profits of $8bn to $10bn. That business is worth the approximately $100bn of market value that Google has right now. Everything else is valued at zero because it has a lot of costs and no revenue. Could Google unlock a lot of value by giving up on everything else they are doing? Maybe not, but they probably wouldn’t lose much value either. I am not suggesting they do that, by the way. But again, I just want to make a point.
That’s a fascinating point. It should be noted that everything Google does that isn’t directly related to search and advertising is essentially a distraction, and that shows: Feedburner has been moribund after it’s acquisition, YouTube can’t make a dime, and Gmail for all it’s wonderfulness is still labeled as beta. Even properties that are actively innovating, like Google Maps, Picasa, and Blogger, are still not earning any revenue for Google and are being actively competed against by Microsoft and open source software.
Of course, what would happen to all those projects if they weren’t subsidized by the web advertising business? In some ways, their very presence forces the competition to innovate. But in the looming economic clouds ahead, maybe the golden era has ended and everyone, even Google, has to abide by the rule that cash flow is king.
(via retweet of @TimOreilly from @JoeTrippi)
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Among the inaugural festivities, the official web site of the White House underwent a transition of its own. The site is now built around a central blog, which is a presidential first and a definite sign of the times. The first post lays out the purpose of the blog in detail:
Just like your new government, WhiteHouse.gov and the rest of the Administration’s online programs will put citizens first. Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities:
Communication – Americans are eager for information about the state of the economy, national security and a host of other issues. This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated. Check out the briefing room, keep tabs on the blog (RSS feed) and take a moment to sign up for e-mail updates from the President and his administration so you can be sure to know about major announcements and decisions.
Transparency – President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise. The President’s executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.
Participation – President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause. Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that. One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.
We’d also like to hear from you — what sort of things would you find valuable from WhiteHouse.gov? If you have an idea, use this form to let us know.
I think that the key here is that the WH website remains an irgan of Executive Branch government and is not just another blog in the standard, political/technology sense. The Communication role is of course obvious, but the Transparency and Participation are also key. Posting executive orders to the web site is a great start, and allowing the public to review and comment on legislation before it gets to the President’s desk is going to really open the legislative process to the public in an innovative and rigorous way.
It’s interesting to see that a lot of technology experts don’t seem to understand the civic context of the purpose of the WH blog. For example, Dave Winer complains,
The White House should send us to places where our minds will be nourished with new ideas, perspectives, places, points of view, things to do, ways we can make a difference. It must take risks, because that is reality — we’re all at risk now — hugely.
I don’t advocate a blogging host like the Obama campaign website. There are already plenty of places to host blogs. But I do want the White House to be a public space, where new thinking from all over the world meets other new thinking. A flow distributor. A two-way briefing book for the people and the government.
We need the minds of industry, education, health care, government, people from all walks of life, to connect. It doesn’t have to be whitehouse.gov, but why not, why wait?
I think this critique is unfair – partly because by publicizing executive orders and legislation, the public minds Dave talks about will have unprecedented access to the inner workings of the executive branch. By using the blog as a central distribution point, it already is the two-way briefing book he talks about.
What the WH site should not be, however, is a “public space”. The two-way flow needs to be of absolute highest SNR, which anyone who has spent even ten minutes online can attest is fundamentally incompatible with an open forum. The flow of information in both directions must be structured and controlled for maximum efficiency. If instead WH.gov becomes another home to the constant stream of garbage that spews over most public fora on the web, then one, the public will not be well-served by having to wade through the muck to find the information of genuine civic interest; and two, the very concept of an open and transparent portal into the inner workings of government will be discredited, and that we above all must not allow to happen. WH.gov is a courageous experiment and we must not let it fail.
It should be noted that the official WhiteHouse YouTube channel does allow comments. Since YouTube is not a government site, there isn’t the same requirement of decorum and civic sensibility, so a free-for-all can be tolerated.
Related – see Patrick Ruffini, Ars Technica, and TechCrunch for further comments on the WH.gov blog from a technological perspective. Also see Democracy Arsenal and Open Left for brief commentary from a political perspective. Finally, Read/Write Web has a nice 12-year retrospective on the evolution of the WH.gov website through the past several Presidencies.
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One of my mantras is to rely on others to filter my data in the social web, because the key to improving your signal to noise ratio is not to try and filter the noise, but actually to reduce your signal. That’s a lot harder than it sounds to do. But it’s made a lot easier by genuinely smart filterers like Dave Winer’s NewsJunk, which was an invaluable tool during the election season. Winer basically culled the best and most interesting news stories (by hand) and fed them to a dedicated RSS feed, which then fed into twitter. As a result I often briefed myself on the day’s politics by first checking @newsjunkies rather than wading into my mess of feeds on Google Reader cold. This is why i am genuinely sad to see that Winer is considering pulling the plug on NewsJunk now that the election has ended.
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Twitter: over one billion tweets served. Actually, it’s probably more than that, since the count is from GigaTweet, an external service and not an official count. If we do the math, that comes out to:
140 chars per tweet x 1 byte per char x 10^9 tweets = 140 billion bytes = 130.4 GB worth of data
The 1 billion tweet mark took Twitter just over two years to achieve. Even assuming exponential growth, it’s hard to see Twitter’s raw tweet storage needs exceeding a terabyte ($109 and falling) in the next five years.
Of course, raw storage alone isn’t the whole story, since unlike the gigabytes of data on our home computers, the data on Twitter needs to be actively accessed and queried from the databases, which is a non-trivial task (as any regular user of Twitter over the past year can attest to). This is probably why Twitter has been enforcing a limit of 3200 tweets on users’ archives. The overhead on maintaining the archives beyond that is probably a threat to Twitter’s ability to maintain uptime and service reliability. The limit seems reasonable, since only the heaviest users will have reached that limit by now – I’ve been on twitter longer than most of the A-listers, and I tweet every blog entry I make from 5-6 different blogs, but I’m still only around 1200 tweets. Also, with far fewer followers (several hundred instead of thousands), I have only a handful of @replies compared to the firehose that folks like Darren (@problogger) or Scoble (@Scobleizer) see on their real-time clients. As a result, Twitter is more akin to an email/private messaging system for users like myself, rather than a real-time chatroom for the big users.
Still, even a casual Twitter user should be at least partially alarmed at the thought that their entire Twitter history is subject to arbitrary limits and no real guarantee of backup. As usual, it’s up to us to protect our own data, especially data in a walled garden (albeit one with handy RSS and API gates). Good user practices are the same whether we are using an online service or word processing at home, after all.
Here are just a few ways in which you can backup your tweets. I am sure there are more, so if you have any ideas I’ve not listed here, please share in comments!
Tweetake.com – This service lets you enter your username and download a CSV-format file of your followers, favorites, friends, and tweets. Unfortunately, @replies are not available for backup. It doesn’t save direct messages, either, but if you configure your twitter account to send you notification emails of direct messages, you can t least archive those separately. The CSV format is useful for archiving but not very user-friendly, though you could in principle import the data again into some other form.
Alex King’s Twitter Tools – this is a wordpress plugin that lets you manage your twitter account directly from your WordPress blog. The plugin lets you blog each tweet and/or tweet each blog post, and you can also generate a daily tweet digest as a blog post if you choose (and assign it to an arbitrary category). There’s no way to archive replies, DMs, or follower relationships.
Twitter itself supports RSS feeds, so you could slurp your own feed of replies and tweets using a feedreader and periodically back those up or even write them to disk. Also, users of third-party services like Socialthing, Friendfeed, or Ping.fm also have an alternate interface to Twitter that could potentially be used for backup. However, none of these provide comprehensive tweet archives either, only real-time mirroring.
Finally, Dave Winer has proposed a service/API that twitter clients can use to backup the RSS feed of a twitter account, but this is more of a technical solution of interest to twitter developers rather than end users.
UPDATE: Johann Burkard has written a great little tool in Java called (appropriately) TwitterBackup. It is a very simple piece of freeware that simply downloads all your tweets to a XML-format file saved locally. You specify a filename as you desire, and the tool is smart enough that if you give it the name of a file that already exists, it will only download newer tweets and append them to it rather than do a full download again. This incremental backup of tweets is ideal behavior – the only thing that this tool doesn’t do is preserve your follower/following relationships.
To be honest, none of these solutions are perfect, though Tweetake and Twitter Backup come closest. What would the ideal twitter backup tool look like? A few thoughts:
- be available as a desktop client or Adobe AIR application rather than yet another online service asking for your twitter password.1
- At first run, it should allow you to retrieve your entire (available) twitter history, including tweets, replies, and DMs.
- After the initial import, it should provide for periodic incremental backups of your tweets/replies/DMs, at an interval you specify (ideally, a five minute interval minimum).
- It should preserve your friend/follower relationships, and let you import everyone you follow onto any new twitter account or export all their RSS feeds as an OPML file.
What else? There’s definitely a niche out there for an enterprising developer to take Twitter’s API and create a tool focused on backup rather than yet another twitter client. Hopefully before I reach the 3200 tweet limit myself!
--- Twitter’s implementation of OAuth or OpenID or some other authorization system is long overdue, by the way. [↩]
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Darren Rowse of ProBlogger fame has launched a new blog, TwiTip, aimed at introducing Twitter to new users. Darren always has an interesting and insightful take on blogging and so I think his insights will be worth reading even if you’re a veteran twitter user. Given how much I blog about twitter I can fully understand the appeal of starting a blog devoted to it!
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At RWW, Bernard Lunn asks readers to suggest a revenue model for Twitter, that satisfies two criteria:
1. Do not irritate/interrupt the user and even occasionally add value to the user.
2. Provide a value proposition that is so compelling that even conservative buyers give it a try.
There’s actually a fairly simple solution that meets the criteria above, and it relies on a relatively new feature that Twitter introduced primarily for the 2008 presidential elections: selling ad space on topics pages. The common topics pages are candidate-specific ones like “Obama” or “Palin” but there are also new topical ones being generated such as “Muslim” or “Colin Powell“. Note that these topical pages, unlike the candidate pages, are dynamic and fade into and out of existence based on the real-time activity of twitter users, so these truly are a snapshot of current discussion rather than any kind of archive or comprehensive index. There’s even a “tag cloud” at the top of the main election page that shows what the current topics are and the topicscan be filtered by candidate (for example, “Obama and muslim“)
These topics and candidates pages are election-centric for obvious reasons, but there’s no reason that they can’t be expanded in scope, analogous to the breadth of various topics at alltop.com. The crucial difference here however is that the content is entirely user-generated tweets rather than RSS feeds of news and blogs, and is presented as a real-time “river” of information.
So, then, how to monetize? Simply, to imitate Google, and sell ad space on the topics pages. Twitter could even partner with Google or Yahoo and share the revenue. Imagine a partnership with google, for example: adwords purchasers would buy ads for specific keywords, and if/when those keywords become Topics at Twitter, their ads would display. Likewise, contextual ads based on the real-time river of tweets for a given topic could also scroll by in the sidebar, or appear interspersed.
The point here is that Twitter has created instantaneous portals for the hottest topics of the day, and what makes it so useful as an end-point destination for websurfers is that the twitter users are generating the content, providing both links and commentary. So, the real estate created by these topics pages has real value for advertising, as long as it is contextual and targeted. But targeting is easy because instead of having to analyse the entire webpage (as Adsense does at present), the contextual algorithm has a head start because of the topic itself. Then the remaining contextualization can be done on the river of tweets for fine-tuning. This should ensure better relevancy and higher click-through overall.
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My plugin, AHP Sitewide Recent Posts, is an entrant in the WPMU.org plugin competition. I would greatly appreciate your support! Please cast your vote here and vote for “Yet Another Posts Plugin“. Thank you!
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