Hugh Buchanan My Ramblings

Apparently Twitter Is Worth Money

According to a TechCrunch article published Wednesday, Twitter has a valuation somewhere around the billion dollar mark.  I'm not an economist and will leave it to the numbers people to debate the valuation accuracy... but the fact is, Twitter is worth $1bn for at least a moment.

Earlier this year, during the Iran election, Twitter's importance in daily life was emphasized when they were asked to not perform maintenance and allow Citizens of Earth the ability to tweet instead.  The fact is, these social communication methods are vital to many people.

I am worried about Twitter's ability to make money only because the system is vital to many.  It's not the end of the world if you can't read @alyankovic's latest tweet.

I hate getting spam emails.  But I do periodically look at consumer businesses on Twitter and check out deals.  I don't want my local news station to email me when something happens.  But I do enjoy being able to see the local news tweets, when I seek them out.

I wish #140conf and the other communities were pushing harder for an open standard.  I think it should be similar to XMPP/Jabber is the open IM standard.  I am @yebo on twitter, which might make me @yebo~twitter.com.  If google operated a system, perhaps I'd be @hugh~google.com.  The problem here is the added length of a post now containing more info for a user reference.  Perhaps the url shortening folks would get on board.

I don't think my idea is exactly how things should be, but I want something like my idea so that no one has to be fully tied to one service provider.  Additionally, I want to be able to back up my twitter feed.. ah well.