Once again with Twitter's BM

Monday, November 24, 2008 by Dave Winer.

BM stands for Business Model, not what you think.  

Steve Gillmor has the Gillmor Gang and he uses that pulpit to push a future of ideas and truths flying around the Internet, our ideas -- with all kinds of pipes and funnels to catch the stuff we want and let the other stuff flow by. We're going to need it now that the newspapers are evaporating at the same time as the banks. Unfortunate timing. 

Steve wants Track. The FF guys say they'll give it to him, and I believe them. Their philosophy is to pass back everything they suck in. Good philosophy. So far they've stuck to it, more or less. Meanwhile, reading the tea leaves I'd guess that Twitter is going to sell track to consumer marketing companies, based on the model that we're eyeballs on couches and there's $$$ value in selling what we're talking about to BigCos. To me, this is very sad old thinking and doomed to fail, like people living off the rise in equity in their houses. Much better to go direct, get and give money to and from users. There are a lot more of us, and we've got better ideas. 

Here's my recipe for Twitter's business... 

1. Acquire a couple of the add-on vendors, to send the signal to developers -- they're looking to buy. 

2. Open up the APIs fully, limited only by technical realities, don't hold anything in reserve.  

3. Offer the add-ons to users at a price. The basic service remains free forever, but the add-ons cost. Kind of like wordrpess.com. It works for Apple with their app store. Amazon charges for their web services. We're in the period after the second Internet tech crash now, thinking must be adjusted.  

4. Go to step 1, acquire more add-on developers. Then go to step 2, add more APIs, then step 3, offer more for-money features to users, who then can (likely) build businesses off the new features.  

This is Twitter as coral reef, an idea that held promise many months ago but has faded as things have more or less stagnated in TwitterLand.  

Observation -- everyone who has a website that survives will be in competition with Amazon. Start now, don't be thinking about competing with Google for ads, that model is disappearing, just like people who were paying credit card bills by taking out third, fourth and fifth mortgages, only to make their next down payment with a credit card!  

Otherwise, I'd advise the S3 people to get a Twitter-like notification system ready asap. You know what -- I'm pretty sure they have one in the pipe. 

Update: Steve also has a nice pulpit at TechCrunchIT.