Does Twitter Hate Advertising?

Here is Twitter’s position on advertsing (from the twitter blog) ….

When we speak publicly about how Twitter might become a profitable business, we talk about the idea of commercial usage and then explain that we’re still exploring what that means—that’s true. We also say traditional web banner advertising isn’t interesting to us which is also true. However, to say we are philosophically opposed to any and all advertising is incorrect.

For a long time, we’ve said that we think there are interesting opportunities related to commercial usage. Businesses and individuals are getting value out of Twitter and we may be able to enhance that. We’ve just begun exploring in this area—early ideas include account authentication, management tools, and discovery mechanisms. We’ll keep you posted.

The idea of taking money to run traditional banner ads on Twitter.com has always been low on our list of interesting ways to generate revenue. However, facilitating connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways is compelling. We’re going to leave the door open for exploration in this area.

Does Twitter hate advertising? Of course not. It’s a huge industry filled with creativity and inspiration. There’s also room for new innovation in advertising, marketing, and public relations and Twitter is already part of that.

Biz Stone Interview

In a video age, it’s really nice to [occasionally] step back and listen to an audio only broadcast, uncluttered by reference to charts, graphs, and corporate logos. This is a clip of one of the newest media companies (Twitter) being interviewed by one of the oldest (KQED Public Radio). Both, oddly enough, eloquently simple.

Everything you wanted to know about Twiiter – Biz Stone Interview

Interview with Twitter Founder Biz Stone on ColbertNation.

Social Networks Are the New E-mail

Tens of millions of people are using social networks to stay in touch. In fact, Facebook alone has over 175 M users. The growth in such services is being heralded as the start of the real-time, pervasive web.

Just like email replaced the written letter, and SMS is replacing (maybe supplementing) email, status updates via Facebook, Twitter and other real time update sites, might just replace everything. And what started as a consumer application is now becoming increasingly important as a business application.

So, what’s different between email, SMS, and social media updates? In large part, social media is about micro updates (140 characters or less) and its is centered around your daily activity stream. This allows consumers and businesses to publish information that people can choose to engage with it, or not.

The problem with existing social media companies is interoperability. For example, while Twitter can be used to power a status update on Facebook the same is not true in reverse. While e-mail has common protocols which allow people to send and receive messages even if they are with different services, such as Hotmail or GMail, the same is not completely true with status updates and activity feeds.

This makes many the business model of many of these services feel like the walled gardens that killed many of the early Internet companies.

While Facebook seemingly has no incentive to open up its service, other companies are working towards a more open system and many believe there will be no separation between Facebook and Friendfeed and Twitter in the the near future.