It all started with a blog post by Fred Wilson about 3^rd party apps temporarily filling holes for Twitter followed by a series of announcement that sparked the Twitt-o-sphere on fire. The young growing social network officially released their first mobile application for Blackberry and announced the acquisition of Tweetie (leading iPhone client).

What does it mean for other 3^rd party applications offering competing products on BlackBerry and iPhone? Well it doesn’t look too good to be honest- terrible news for Socialscope, Ubertwitter and Seesmic who devoted thousand of hours building a Twitter client for Blackberry and ultimately hoped to be acquired by Twitter…

The official application uses non-public APIs, offers no request limitation (recently Twitter raised their limitation to 150 requests per hour) and can be easily promoted virally by Twitter as a featured application. So many reasons for developers to spoof a revolt and to call for a broken Twitter eco-system…I call it bullsh*t.

Because frankly – this is what they were all looking for. To beat the watch and build a good enough client so Twitter will buy them out. It didn’t happen although Twitter had initiated contact with those companies. Obviously the price range to acquire a Blackberry client didn’t make any sense to Twitter’s investors (Fred Wilson at least) so they decided to go build their own. If one of the apps had been bought out – the feedback would have been very different.

When I hear stories about Twitter eco-system it reminds me of a quote from Louis C.K. “it’s funny how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago”.

About 15 months ago I wrote this post discussing about Twitter’s options to drive revenue. The main threat to revenue stream was obviously the existence of 3^rd party applications making money on the back of the social network. Not many developers were too concerned about it and kept raising money to bite the hand that feeds them.

This is why Ev Williams promptly announced the acquisition of Tweetie, confusing everyone on Twitter’s real intentions for future growth. Will they buy or will they develop?

In the meantime, many Twitter clients will disappear from the radar until developers can focus on producing genuine ideas and not just filling holes.

Back in August I predicted Facebook will take #1 rank away from Google in traffic before the end of the year. December results are not out yet but there is a high probability I am right. As I was looking for data on the subject – a new question arise.

Is traffic a sign of popularity?

So I went on writing down numbers on a scrapbook. My primary goal was to search brand names and the number of search associated with that brand. To do so I used the Top 100 brand by Millward Brown [PDF].
Surprisingly Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, My Space are not listed by the research institute. Even in a brick and mortar world, Facebook should be in top 5 most known brands.

Below are results found using Google.com [US English page as of December 30, 2009].

Few basic observations: Google and Facebook together are more popular than Web. US takes the lead with over 23 billions search results. USA and War all together are less popular than Yahoo!

Behind those figures I see two conclusions. First, top brands -as described in the study published by Millward Brown- are yet far behind in terms of web image. Their online presence is a failure for 95% of them. This should give hope to all online viral social media jungle marketing agencies out there. The second conclusion is sadder: traffic doesn’t mean revenue. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, MySpace and Hotmail generating over 5.3 billion of search results have an estimated global revenue of $1.3 billion for 2009 representing 0,003% of Wal-Mart’s 2009 revenue.

It brings us back to valuation calculation- should we continue to use online popularity or traffic to rate online businesses?

What do you think?

Posted via web from [blog.florianseroussi.com]

You are now familiar with my regular cyber squatting on Pat’s blog.
Today 1 year after this post we are going to see if Twitter can be mainstream and still be interesting.
In last few weeks celebrities took over our favorite social medium. Not that it bothers me. Twitter is a democracy. My issue is mostly with the exchange everyone is asked to make in any society.
You cannot invite yourself to my table and not share or entertain conversation. Celebrities- as much as I hate the term- have massively polluted our tool engaging themselves in a race for followers.
Ashton Kutcher aka @aplusk is now self-declared King of Twitter. Oprah will rule on top of the pyramid in a couple of weeks and I’m an inch away to drop out. To better understand what is happening I have to throw some figures.
Boring – I know…but it makes my case.

@aplusk ‘friends’ grow at a rate of 770 followers per tweet

@oprah ‘friends’ add up at a rate of 33.000 followers per tweet. She has nearly half a million follower after 13 updates.

And we want to ignore something is broken?

I wanted to believe Twitter is all about CONVERSATION not COMPETITION. It survived spambots, porn, escorts, solicitation, gaming but not fame…if not stopped now the race will get nasty. @michaeljackson, @mariahcarey, @robertredford, @hannahmontana, who is next?
I couldn’t figure out numbers of tweets related to the stupid challenge @aplusk vs. @cnnbrk but I’m sure it captured over 50% of total stream.

There is a solution to avoid social hijacking. Very simple solution. Make stats private. No more public count of followers/following. It will make the Twitter community much ‘cleaner’ and bring everyone back to sharing.
Celebrities are welcome to bring good noise. They will certainly get a lot of attention but they will have to follow rules of social engagement.

Last night I threw the idea –I’m not claiming to be the 1st who thought about it btw- on Twitter thinking it will be ignored. To my surprise it has been massively re-tweetted.

Twitter: you need to listen – we do not want popularity, we want quality content.

Ironically Twitter founders have engaged themselves in a race against Facebook so I guess we have come full circle. After all they ‘only’ need 200 Ashton Kutcher to beat them.