Remember that pesky 4 million dollars that Twitter was expecting to make this year? We had no idea where it was to come from, until today. You already heard the news, Twitter and Bing are now quite the hot couple.
Point: that 4 million is almost assuredly coming from Redmond to the Twitter HQ. Access to the firehose of tweets from Twitter cannot be free. If Twitter gave it away, it would be a gigantic misstep.
And who has both the money to purchase access, and an axe to grind against a market leader? Bing, of course. And with Bing, Microsoft can toss mud on its first or second chief rival, Google. Twitter must have had a fun time watching Google and Bing fight it out for access to the Firehose of tweets.
Assuming that Bing began paying for access this starting in September (for testing), we are looking a payment of about $1,000,000 monthly from Microsoft to Twitter. Not a bad start to the monetization of a social platform. Of course, Twitter has a long way to go to meet that one billion dollar valuation, but this is a very positive beginning.
Assuming that Twitter promise to work with more partners is accurate, all the major search engines will soon be paying Twitter. It becomes very simple to see Twitter’s road to profits, and to continued growth.
As long as they put some of that money to new servers, I will be content.
A big congratulations to both Bing and Twitter for bringing us the technology that we have all been waiting for in real time.
Flush! That’s the sound money makes when you flush it down the toilet.
Pay for access to tweets? Why? Do they contain insider trading information?
Most, if not all, tweets contain pointless dribble!
And someone at MS has agreed to pay for that pointless dribble.
I say why pay, when you can get pointless dribble for free on the shitload of forums on the internet.
Hell, the forums provide dribble that’s even more than 140 chars long. So they provide even more information to index.
Lets say I do a Bing search for playstation3.
And let us assume that we get to see a section ‘real time results’ on the page.
If I click on the result, I get to see a tweet of someone saying that they are at a playstation 3 launch event.
Or maybe I see a tweet of someone that just bought a brand new playstation 3.
So, do these tweets actually provide any value to searches? Can people actually put valuable information into 140 chars?
Great for Twitter that they are making a buck (finally). The shareholders at MS need to bitch slap some senior execs. Because, they are flushing their money down the toilet.
@Twinkle Toes: just look at those “hudson river plane crash” tweets! i mean there’s nothing more valuable than information, and especially who has that information first… thats basically what the world today is all about. and twitter is at the very core of that. and btw i think your “insider trading information” joke was not that far fetched, it could be used in such a context!