Is Twitter Worth $1 Billion?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 30th, 2008 3:32 PM
This morning I loaded up Twitter.com and received an error message telling me that the site was not responding. Not the good way to start the day for a billion dollar company. How did I come up with the company being worth $1 billion? I didn’t, my friend Nate Westheimer did. Nate wrote a piece suggesting that a mobile payment system would be Twitter’s ticket to becoming a billion dollar company in a short period of time.
Not a bad idea to be honest, and it is similar to the idea that Facebook has, which is preparing to launch a payment system for their platform. Want to send your friend $5 real quick for the beers they bought you last night? No problem, just text “p biznickman $5″. I hadn’t thought of this solution for Twitter previously, but this makes a lot of sense.
Micropayments are currently an area of rising importance. While I may not text my friends $0.50, I could easily see an API tying into Twitter to transfer small payments for a virtual gift or obtaining access to a premium blog post. While the concept is still foreign to many people, a text based way for transferring small amounts of money makes a ton of sense.
While Twitter doesn’t have a massive amount of market penetration, the site has become ubiquitous among early adopters and making the leap to the mainstream is not far away. So how will Twitter end up making money (if they can keep their site up)? Text based payments if they follow Nate’s advice. Do you agree that a Twitter based payment system would make a lot of sense?
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Also Twitter would face competition from Facebook, PayPal (don't they essentially offer this already?), Google, etc. In the end this would turn Twitter into an execution play, and they've already shown that they can't execute on various key aspects of their business, i.e. reliability and scalability.
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Good discussion though!
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