…The Daily Telegraph proves my point by publishing an article calling Google “archaic” and publishing the following gem of insight:
Viral social media networks like Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed are making more and more of the information real-time, thereby establishing a rival ecosystem to Google’s web of static pages. Last year, Twitter even acquired its own real-time search-engine called Summize, thereby positioning this leading real-time platform as potentially the most profound strategic threat that Google has ever faced.
This kind of misses the big point is that no-one goes to Twitter, Facebook etc for shopping. No-one goes to them for research. And, more cogently still, not a single one of them is making money.
I believe Facebook is making money.
I think Twitter have a few ways they can monetize it – the ads they display don’t work – but I bet they could do some kind of targetted tweets system. Like say message everyone who has used this keyword in their feed in the last 30 days – that would be cool.
I’m registered on FriendFeed, but I don’t really use it – whats it good for?! I’ve got my RSS feeds on it, but thats it…
Yo!
I think Facebook is still shrouded in secrecy in terms of money. It seems mad that you *wouldn’t* make money off 200 million people who spend their every waking hour on your site, but there again MySpace never managed it either
Trouble is, no-one’s on there to do their shopping. Same goes for Twitter. And without people buying something somewhere along the line, it’s hard to make money without selling user’s data. And Twitter in particular know fuck all about their users
I think I’ve got a friendfeed account and I too have not the slightest fucking clue why or what it’s for.