Comments on: Is Twitter Planning To Monetize The Firehose?

By: MarkH

MarkH — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:26:00 +0000

Anything that can be easily reproduced will naturally tend towards a free pricing model. You can see this effect going on in the itunes app store.

If you start charging, the crowds will jump ship to the first free alternative and your community is gone.

Think beehives and honey….

By: jeremy

jeremy — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:30:05 +0000

It saddens me that there isn’t a sufficient market to support alternatives

That was my main point, in my first comment.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:19:48 +0000

I guess I don’t feel exploited by free online services–at least not yet. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not happy with the dominance of the ad-supported model, and I’ve said as much repeatedly. But I don’t feel forced to use Google, Twitter, or any other free online service. It saddens me that there isn’t a sufficient market to support alternatives, but that’s just the way market capitalism works. Changing the current landscape is a very ambitious project of education, persuasion, and innovation.

By: jeremy

jeremy — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:05:33 +0000

I don’t buy (ha! pun!) the “it’s already free” argument. For two reasons:

- Network effects provide an effective glass wall around going elsewhere

- The “give it away for free but make money on them behind closed doors” model is becoming ubiquitous. Maybe it’s a slippery slope to say so, but effectively there is no “elsewhere” to go. There is no real choice one can make. The moment one logs on to the internet, one’s activity is being bought and sold. The only option is to not go on the internet at all. And is that really the society that we’re trying to create?

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:38:03 +0000

Hey, if I’m getting a service I value without paying cash for it, then I expect the provider to try to make money off of me somehow. I may be able to block ads, but I can’t block them from monetizing my data if the terms of service allow for that. If I don’t like the terms, I can go elsewhere. But I hardly feel entitled to profit sharing when I’m getting a free lunch as it is.

By: jeremy

jeremy — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:11:10 +0000

I wonder when users are ever going to wise up, and only use services in which they get a cut of the profits whenever their own data is being resold.

More and more businesses are starting to operate on this model, and I don’t know if I’m completely comfortable with it.

By: Chris Brown

Chris Brown — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:52:54 +0000

I wish that I had someway to tap into twitter money.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:10:08 +0000

Jrome, that’s a fair point. It really depends what Twitter negotiates with G or M. My concern for Twitter is that runs the risk of becoming a dumb pipe if Google, Microsoft, or anyone else has the ability to repackage that data themselves. I’m sure the folks at Twitter are aware of this danger, but I imagine that it will make the negotiation of terms an interesting challenge.

By: Jrome

Jrome — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:59:33 +0000

The value of the firehose can and will, I believe, extend beyond one or two deals with the search giants. The data could be broken out at a variety of levels to a multitude of players – consider hyperlocal search for localized media/news sites as just one of many variants. In my mind Twitter stands to gain more from thousands of such deals than from one or two megadeals.

However, any deal with Google or Microsoft for access to the Firehose will be a great way to showcase the power inherent with millions of tweets per day and it will surely grease the wheels for the smaller deals to come.