Amazon + Twitter = eBay + Skype?

Wednesday, June 25. 2008

Amazon + Twitter = eBay + Skype?

Sharp observation from HipMojo re the investment by Amazon in Twitter:

Anyway, I think this is the first step towards Amazon.com buying Twitter… it just makes more sense to use something like Twitter in a commercial capacity than a communications capacity, which is odd because Twitter now bills itself as a “communications utility”. Whatever floats their boat…

Today, the vanity crowd uses Twitter in the way that they do, in 5 years - if Twitter is around - it will be used as a commercial platform. Mark my words.

Marked.

I also think it will incorporate elements of Seesmic, Dopplr and a number of other web 2.0 plays because it will have the end customer relationships, and its easier to just add functionality.

But, Twitter can only be bought by someone who brings useful synergies, and ideally makes money in some offset way, as Twitter itself has no direct revenue model yet - Amazon's infrastructure goes some way towards that, especially if the money paid to Twitter comes back as rental for their infrastructure

But what they really need is a network, or else it will be more akin to eBay buying Skype. This isn't a commerce play in my opinion, it is a comms one - Twitter is the embryo UC system Telcos have been trying to build for decades, and you don't really need your own comms network to flog retail goods online.

Ask eBay.......

Posted by Alan Patrick in Web Services / Cloud Computing at 01:02 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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Alan, can you get into this a little bit deeper and more concretely? Especially what you mean about a "commercial" platform vs. "communications"? I'm not quite grokking...

For all the people crying about how a "subscription" would be a tax on "the people who made it popular", I can imagine a way for Twitter to charge commercial entities a subscription fee for additional data, unlimited messaging, yadda yadda.

I can only imagine that Zappos customer service is better because they've got X000 employees on there answering ?'s, talking with suppliers, etc.

Especially if they could get Twitter to plug into other communities (Twitter bots that enabled people to interface with message boards, etc), there could be some serious value there.

Plug it into GetSatisfaction, for example.

Just throwin' out some random ideas...none of this is fully baked, but I'd love to hear more detail from you...

Thanks!

#1 Ethan Bauley (Homepage) on 2008-06-25 01:50 (Reply)

By comms platform I mean something that is mainly used for communication, rather than transactions (commercial).

I'm sure Twitter (and Skype) could have paid-for features (more than 50 friends, certain functions etc).

I think Twitter will take on some of the other communies' functions. Things like Seesmic, Dopplr etc are imho applications that will be bought or copied into other UC services

#2 alan p on 2008-06-25 08:32 (Reply)

There may be some simpler synergies too... Amazons application infrastructure is an obvious cure to Twitter's scaling problems. Is Twitter already an amazon web services customer?

Twitter is a fairly simple subscribe/publish message bus, which gives it all sorts of marketing applications - with the right APIs (I'm with you there Ethan).

#3 Benjamin Ellis (Homepage) on 2008-06-25 09:34 (Reply)

Thanks for the thoughts, guys!

Here's a new question:

What did you mean by "UC system"

("Twitter is the embryo UC system Telcos have been trying to build")

#4 Ethan Bauley on 2008-06-25 15:36 (Reply)

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