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Posts Tagged ‘Dick Costolo’

Twitter’s commercial accounts may finally land at Chirp conference next month

Commercial accounts for businesses on Twitter may finally make their debut next month at the company’s inaugural developer conference Chirp.

Anamitra Banerji is leading a session on commercial accounts in the afternoon at the conference. Last summer, co-founder Biz Stone told us that the company was planning to launch a commercial layer over its ecosystem by year-end. They’re several months behind, but it looks like it may finally be happening.

What could show up in them? Since it’s the hub in its vast network, the company may have the best sense of how many times a tweet was delivered, regardless of which partner it was sent to like Seesmic or Brizzly. The analytics the company will offer probably won’t impede too much partners like CoTweet that have developed enterprise-focused Twitter clients. CoTweet chief executive Jesse Engle, who has seen much of Twitter’s plans, said the company doesn’t have any incentive to build workflow management tools, for example. Plus many business focused Twitter clients have broadened out their reach to include Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace status updates.

Dick Costolo is also giving a speech on monetization strategy and we’ve seen hints dropped that the company’s much anticipated advertising network may also be unveiled there. There hasn’t been official confirmation though. You can see the full schedule here.

Tags: Social Media

Companies: Twitter

People: Anamitra Banerji, Dick Costolo

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What Should Twitter Ads Look Like? And Will You Really Love Them?

Twitter is getting closer to launching its own advertising on the micro-messaging service. Speaking on an advertising industry panel yesterday, the company’s head of monetization, Anamitra Banerji, confirmed that Twitter would launch its own advertising platform within a month or so, at least in a beta test. Twitter has been planning to launch an advertising product for a long time. Last November, COO Dick Costolo told us at our Realtime Crunchup that ads were coming. He promised the new ads “will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it.” And a year ago, Twitter execs discussed different advertising revenue models in a strategy meeting, including realtime search ads, sponsored Tweets, and AdSense-like widgets that could appear on other sites.

Of course, other startups are already experimenting with their own Twitter ads ranging from in-stream sponsored Tweets (Ad.ly) to placing retweet buttons on display ads themselves (Tweetmeme). But what will an official Twitter ad look like? And will people really love it?

There are lots of options for different ad units on Twitter.  Seth Goldstein, the CEO of SocialMedia, was on the same panel and is the one who grilled Banerji about Twitter’s ad plans.  He presented the slide above, which gives some flavor the types of ads which could appear in a social stream like Twitter.  Ads could range from straight endorsements (“This is my favorite salsa”, “My favorite car is a Jetta”) to more subtle local business ads (“I am at Starbucks,” “I am the Mayor of Superdive”).

Other people think the Tweets themselves should be sacrosanct.  Robert Scoble, for instance, suggests the idea of a SuperTweet with all sorts of metadata that pops up when part of the message is rolled over with your mouse.  This data could include things such as the location of the Tweet and how many times it’s been retweeted, but it could also trigger a contextual ad triggered by certain keywords.

Most likely, the ads will start out simple.  If they are in-stream ads, they will be clearly labeled as such, perhaps by highlighting the Tweet with a different background color or otherwise clearly marking it as “Sponsored.” Right now, the only way you know something is a sponsored Tweet is if it is disclosed in the text of the Tweet itself, like in this Ad.ly example:

Twitter could make them stand out more and really distinguish them as ads.  But that in itself would find little love from most Twitter users.  For ads to work on Twitter, or anywhere else on the Web for that matter, they need to be authentic and useful. Contextual ads related to keywords in specific Tweets or shown only to people who are known to be interested in related topics is a better approach.  It is fairly simple to analyze people’s Tweet streams and cull the main topics they either talk about or the topics of the Tweets the people they follow talk about.  Semantically targeted ads should perform better than random ones.  But it’s still not clear what there would be to love there.

It also is not clear what the rules will be for Twitter ads. Will they just start appearing in everyone’s stream, or do you have to allow ads into your stream?  And if you allow the ads, do you get a cut of the ad revenues since they are being shown to your followers?  I’d be very surprised if there is a user opt-out for ads, and even if Twitter starts the ads on its own site it would make sense if it could syndicate them out to third-party Twitter clients.  Eventually, if a Twitter client takes the stream, it will have to take the ads as well.  Presumably, Twitter would offer them a cut of any ad revenues much like Google does with AdSense.

Finally, there is the question of how the ads will be paid for. It makes little sense to charge on a per follower or per impression basis because people tend to read their Twitter streams sporadically.  A cost-per-click model would work much better. Twitter could create a keyword auction to trigger the insertion of the ads and advertisers would only pay for actual clicks like they do with search ads.  That way the entire message of the ad would not have to be contained in the Tweet itself.

With 1.5 billion Tweets a month and growing, advertisers will certainly love any opportunity to insert themselves into the conversations occurring on Twitter. But users generally don’t love ads, they hate them. And it is hard to believe that Twitter is somehow going to magically change that basic fact of life. You tell me: What would Twitter have to do to make you love its ads?

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Lazy Sunday: Twitter Takes The Day Off

Usually when Twitter goes down it happens in the middle of some sort of event that causes a rush of tweets. Today is just a regular old lazy Sunday, and yet here we are, with it being down.

It’s so lazy, in fact, that no one is even bitching about Twitter being down on FriendFeed, even though it has been for a good 30 minutes now. There is also no update on the status blog. It’s weird. It’s eerie. Twitter is quietly down.

It is really news anymore when Twitter goes down? Not really. But they’ve been doing such a good job at staying up for a while now that hiccups like this and the one last week are at least worth noting. Especially when new COO Dick Costolo emphasizes how Twitter will have absolutely no problem scaling going forward.

As always, you should study up on our list of 15 alternate things to do when Twitter is down.

Update: And she’s back. A little over a half hour of downtime it looks like.

Update 2: Deja vu? Looks like Twitter has a canned message for the Status page to note downtime, so I’m not sure why it takes them so long to get it up. It’s smart to default to “about” 10 minutes ago though when it’s really “about” triple that.

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Twitter COO: We’ll Have An Advertising Business Soon. And You’re Going To Love It.

It seems that Twitter has come across the Holy Grail of advertising, and it’s coming soon. Today during his interview at the RealTime CrunchUp, Twitter COO Dick Costolo told the audience a bit about the company’s upcoming advertising business. Costolo was vague on the details, but he did make some promises: “It will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it… It’s going to be really cool.”

Costolo didn’t divulge many more details, though he did mention that it wouldn’t be tied into the site’s retweet feature. When TC editor Michael Arrington tried to clarify by asking if the ads would be integrated into the Tweet stream, Costolo said that “he didn’t say the ads would be mixed in with tweets”. But he didn’t say they wouldn’t, either.

Costolo closed out the topic by saying that the message he wants to send is that “Twitter will have an advertising business, ready in the near future, and available to partners.”

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CrunchUp Starts Off With A Bang Tomorrow With Twitter COO Dick Costolo

Tomorrow’s Real Time CrunchUp in San Francisco is going to be a blast. It’s an all day event absolutely filled with the thought and business leaders in the space, as well as a whole slew of newcomers launching new startups.

And we’re starting off with a bang. Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on stage first for thirty minutes of cold war style interrogation by Steve Gillmor and me.

And we want your help.

Let us know in the comments what questions you’d like us to ask. We can’t promise that Costolo will answer those questions, but we can guarantee that we’ll ask them. And if your proposed questions are good enough, you can get into the event. We’ll give up to five passes (the last seats in the house) to anyone with deeply insightful ideas. Just make sure to use your real email.

Don’t limit yourself to Twitter-related stuff, either. If Twitter is willing to give advice to Rupert Murdoch on how to run his newspapers, then absolutely anything goes.

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone tomorrow in person, if not at the event then at the party afterwards. See you there.

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Twitter Should Decentralize (And Make Money) Via Twitter Server

The background debate about whether or not Twitter can actually scale has intensified. More than a year ago I asked “Twitter At Scale: Will It Work?” Today Twitter is far, far bigger. And the uptime woes continue.

The big problem with Twitter is assymetric following without limitations on the number of connections, which means that a single account can theoretically have a number of followers limited only by the total number of Twitter users. This adds massive complexity to the system. Other services solve the problem by forcing both sides to agree to friendship, a one-to-one relationship. Others, like Facebook, limit the connections to 5,000 as well. But Twitter has no limits on complexity. And since they are a centralized, bottlenecked system, it is both hard to scale and easy to attack.

The short messaging format is popular, and it is now part of the web. It should thus be designed and implemented as a decentralized service like most other core web services (email, DNS, blogging etc.). The Internet was built to withstand a nuclear attack, and it is a platform that can’t be owned, attempting to completely centralize a new core service has never worked.

As Twitter grows, it needs to be architected more like the Internet.

New Twitter COO Dick Costolo says that he believes Twitter can scale in a centralized way, meaning the status quo will continue. But he acknowledges that it is a theoretical debate at this point, and he says that he hasn’t ruled out decentralizing Twitter.

We believe decentralizing Twitter solves two problems – it will help the service scale infinitely. And it is potentially a very lucrative source of revenue.

Email Is A Business – The Microsoft Exchange Model (Get Your Customers To Pay You And Do The Heavy Lifting, Too):

Twitter should look at how email, and commercial email servers such as Microsoft Exchange Server, developed. The business generates $2 billion or more in revenue for Microsoft, and powers the majority of corporate office functions (email, calendar, etc.). Businesses pay a few hundred dollars for Exchange, plust $50 or so per year per user. Plus, the businesses handle all the infrastructure costs (servers, bandwidth, etc.).

Twitter should sell Twitter Server just like Microsoft sells Exchange Server. They’d then run their own Twitter node on their own hardware.

Twitter likely couldn’t get $50/user/year out of Twitter Server, but they could certainly get more than the zero they are charging now. And they’d move the burden of scaling Twitter to businesses that want a highly stable solution. And users could still go to Twitter.com to create accounts for free, too. They just wouldn’t have the benefit of controlling the data on their own servers, and having the peace of mind knowing that their uptime was conditioned only on their own infrastructure, something under their control.

There would be some issues to work out, like the namespace and messaging between parties (If we had our own Twitter server, my user name would have to be something like @nik.techcrunch, or we could just use the existing global namespace – email). Twitter could build and sell a kick-ass Twitter server for corporations and those who wish to control their own messaging and their own brand.

But the benefits would be huge. Possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And a partially decentralized service that would stay live even if Twitter.com went down.

So there are the benefits – revenue, lower operational costs, higher uptime. And there’s one more benefit, too. A decentralized Twitter would suck the air out of the idea that Twitter needs a decentralized competitor. Twitter could own the micro-messaging protocols and core service for the long term. Twitter owns the protocol, the users, the format, the trademarks, the brand and the name – why does it also need to host the whole damn thing?

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