my twitter: twitter in business, using twitter to grow your business

The Next Steps for Twitter Will Mean Either Domination or Suicide…

// August 22nd, 2009 // Twitter News

Twitter has become so successful so quickly because users run and manage most of the communication. The world has been amazed and the speed of delivery and of dissemination of news stories around that break. For example when the plane landed in the Hudson river, Twitter broke the story before all the main news channels. The Iran election was one of the main forms of news from the country when outside news channels were banned. And sports starts and celebrities often broadcast their latest news and gossip on Twitter before their PR agent has time to cobble together some good spin.

But what is the future for Twitter? At some point it needs to generate some income. In recent weeks there have been rumours of the high probability of Twitter cutting a deal with Google.

Twitter has had one of the biggest impacts on the internet world in recent history. Can they continue to innovate and create a sustainable business?

If Twitter sells out to Google, it is likely to perish as quickly as it came.

Twitter dominates the real time communication category but they are facing stiff competition from the likes of Facebook who are striving to grab a piece of the pie.

If twitter fails to innovate, it will confine itself to being a communications medium, or even worse, a news distribution engine and will surely perish.

In the same way, Google as a business is not a search engine but an advertising business that is printing money at unprecedented rates. Google does this by owning the equivalent of distribution in the digital age. The ability to automate the placement of advertising next to relevant content and map consumer queries to useful advertising stands at the heart of Google’s success.

Others have tried and failed to generate the revenues seen at Google: hotmail, digg, New York Times Online etc

Twitter has the potential to become a dominant, sustainable business but it has a narrow window of opportunity. Twitter needs to move quickly or else its value will start to be eroded by its hungry competitors. If it does a deal with Google, all is lost for Twitter.

Users could engage with Twitter for discovery. For example using geo tagging :if you are walking through New York City and fancy seeing a film, simply type in “film” into Twitter and receive a stream of the closest cinemas, with start times and what’s on.

Watch Twitter closely over the next few months. If it gets creative, it will continue to revolutionize the internet and our way of searching for solutions.