Twitter Prefers VC to being Bought or Bootstrapping.
Twitter's going for the VC in almost textbook definition of rocketfuel. Good on em'n'evhead.com : Their self defined options are (with number 5 being their recommended strategy!)
1) Figure out how to get profitable
2) Keep funding Twitter myself
3) Get an alternative source of funding
4) Get bought
5) Raise VC
Speaking of VC (in this case Mr Calacanis raising money for the Hawaii feel designed Mahalo*) I have to laugh at Joshua Jaffe at VC Ratings, talking about being an "editor" (hey one day you can be promoted to "producer" then "EP") on a human edited search engine (reminds me of the one in Michael Wolf's Definitive Dot Com book Burn Rate ) : "I showed up for my first day of training at the assigned time in the afternoon. I was seated in the middle of an enormous open room with nothing in it but hundreds of tables, computers and "editors". It looked like a post-modern vision of Dickensian England. The draft was persistent and the work was inane. I was trained on a computer to search for a specific topic on the web and assign it the appropriate classification in the company's index. I did that for a few hours until training ceased. The next morning, I got an offer from The Deal, which I gladly accepted. I didn't show up for "training" the next day or the day after that."
* I definitely think there are spaces for quality search results which filter out search engine optimised content and also display content in new non page ranked "relevance" focused ways. I like the on holiday, feeling good design of Mahalo - except maybe fonts are a bit big. What I'd like more of is less meta-aggregation of evergreen content, and more a curated snapshot of the current LiveWeb. eg I do a search for Lindsay Lohan (after her car accident) or Nicole Richie (after her American Values email) and Mahalo doesn't help me get quality up to date content in these areas. It provides more biographical information and primary links. I think is what google and wikipedia do well already. What neither of them do well, is curated aggregation of popular live web searches. (if i search for lindsay lohan on technorati i end up on the other end of spectrum, which is all the myspace, youtube and livejournal posts/videos in the last 43 minutes about Lindsay. If I'm going after the mainstream, and in this example, those who buy lots of celebrity gossip supermarket magazines - it's not a meta-biography people are after it's content from the last few days or hours. i should know, on gnoos, the most popular search is for Emma the Ice Queen on the latest series of Big Brother in Australia. No-one wants to know Emma's biography. They want H-264, MPG4, JPG and livefeed transcriptions :)
1) Figure out how to get profitable
2) Keep funding Twitter myself
3) Get an alternative source of funding
4) Get bought
5) Raise VC
Speaking of VC (in this case Mr Calacanis raising money for the Hawaii feel designed Mahalo*) I have to laugh at Joshua Jaffe at VC Ratings, talking about being an "editor" (hey one day you can be promoted to "producer" then "EP") on a human edited search engine (reminds me of the one in Michael Wolf's Definitive Dot Com book Burn Rate ) : "I showed up for my first day of training at the assigned time in the afternoon. I was seated in the middle of an enormous open room with nothing in it but hundreds of tables, computers and "editors". It looked like a post-modern vision of Dickensian England. The draft was persistent and the work was inane. I was trained on a computer to search for a specific topic on the web and assign it the appropriate classification in the company's index. I did that for a few hours until training ceased. The next morning, I got an offer from The Deal, which I gladly accepted. I didn't show up for "training" the next day or the day after that."
* I definitely think there are spaces for quality search results which filter out search engine optimised content and also display content in new non page ranked "relevance" focused ways. I like the on holiday, feeling good design of Mahalo - except maybe fonts are a bit big. What I'd like more of is less meta-aggregation of evergreen content, and more a curated snapshot of the current LiveWeb. eg I do a search for Lindsay Lohan (after her car accident) or Nicole Richie (after her American Values email) and Mahalo doesn't help me get quality up to date content in these areas. It provides more biographical information and primary links. I think is what google and wikipedia do well already. What neither of them do well, is curated aggregation of popular live web searches. (if i search for lindsay lohan on technorati i end up on the other end of spectrum, which is all the myspace, youtube and livejournal posts/videos in the last 43 minutes about Lindsay. If I'm going after the mainstream, and in this example, those who buy lots of celebrity gossip supermarket magazines - it's not a meta-biography people are after it's content from the last few days or hours. i should know, on gnoos, the most popular search is for Emma the Ice Queen on the latest series of Big Brother in Australia. No-one wants to know Emma's biography. They want H-264, MPG4, JPG and livefeed transcriptions :)
posted by redbarren at 12:34 PM
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