shyam's blog

Om Malik has posted an entry on how Twitter could monetize and make money off their service, especially from the ultra-power users like Robert Scoble and Leo Laporte. But there are a couple of points that he has gotten wrong there.

1. His hypothetical 30 GB of data transfer for Scoble alone does not take into account what is Twitter's major problem: tracking. Scaling for known relationships are relatively easy, because you are dealing always with a finite number and you are also dealing with spikes that can be guessed to a great extent. The case is entirely different with keyword tracking.
2. It ignores Twitter's Jabber problems, which will gradually grow to eclipse the problems it is having with API, which is throttled anyway at 70 (60, says Aditya in the comments) requests in an hour.

Realistically, I don't think Twitter can continue the Jabber service the way it is being run right now. They will need to limit tracking per user to maybe a maximum of five, so that the entire tracking mess can be brought under control. If you want to track more than that, you need to pay. And people who normally track more than four or five terms are likely to be PR or other professionals who can afford to pay for the service. This one avenue for them to get some money back into the system.

There needs to be a premium API endpoint, which does not have the 70 requests per hour limit attached to it. The current API client experience is very laggard and there is an opportunity there to scale the API much easier than scaling either Jabber or the tracking service. Once you kill the Jabber service, the premium API becomes the only available service from which you can get a user experience that is closest to the IM-based interface to Twitter.

The blog has not been updated in over twenty days, not for a want of things to write about, but more because of the minor machinations that are at work. There is plenty of plumbing happening in the background, but the building, at least for the time being, remains the same boring one.

It is strange to be on the internet on a Sunday morning, after having the read the day's newspapers and watching an election unravel on television: there is just such a disconnect between all the three in terms of how you interact with it and what you get from each that the term "convergence" looks more like a joke than anything else.

If generic context was what facilitated the explosive growth for the post-bubble internet, it will be personal context that will turn things up many notches in the coming years. There are major issues that need to be addressed for this to be made possible, especially in terms of the humongous amount of computing that is needed to make this possible.

But, as said earlier, convergence is a bit of an issue here. Even generic context has not trickled down into print or television. For that matter, it has not trickled down into even the mobile sphere. And that is where the next big opportunity is. Now, the question is who will take that opportunity?

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