SAN FRANCISCO -- Web 2.0 Summit -- Twitter CEO Evan Williams had no intention of sharing his ideas for a business model at the Summit this week... despite John Battelle's hassling on stage yesterday. That part of the conversation went a little something like this:
Battelle: What's your revenue model going to be?
Williams: We're spending 97 percent of our efforts in trying to improve product and technology... The irresponsible thing to do would be to take our eye off that and focus too much on revenue now with limited resources when ultimately they go hand in hand.
Battelle: So... what's the revenue model?
No answer there from the Williams side of the couch, though he did suggest the company will have one eventually. "You don't raise as much money as we did without having something plausible to tell investors and tell yourself to justify how big a business you're going to build."
Really? I thought this was Web 2.0...
Well, whatever that purportedly plausible thing is, we're still not sure -- though the ever-clever Battelle had a suggestion that Twitter come up with something called "TweetWords" or "TweetSense" -- prompting an "I don't think that's worked for anyone else" from Williams.
These guys are hilarious!
Though he remained elusive on what the model might be, Williams was nonetheless staunchly confident that there will be a model that will be successful.
"We think of Twitter as an information network that tells people what they care about as it's happening in the world, and a substantial part of that is commercial and theoretically monetizable information," said Williams, theoretically.
"If we're driving that kind of value for business, I'm not too worried about our ability to extract value for ourselves," he added.
I'm sorry, @Ev. Can you repeat that?
"If we're driving that kind of value for business, I'm not too worried about our ability to extract value for ourselves."
Ah! So there it is. The scary confidence that drives Twitter to believe that its revenue flow will stem from its own awesomeness. The very odd idea that what Twitter has brought to corporate Americans is so critical they'd die without it.
The theory has been -- and Battelle noted this as well -- that Twitter could eventually charge business users who want data on their consumers, and Williams seemed to agree. But the confidence that Twitter will be able to produce, or is producing, "that kind of value for business" may be premature. Throughout the rest of the interview, Williams admitted that U.S. growth on Twitter has plateaued, and that a lot of people come to Twitter and leave, not knowing what to do next. Further, he said reliability on the site is still a problem... which its users are painfully aware of. (Someone in the crowd angrily stood up to share his thoughts on Twitter's suspending people's accounts for "suspicious activity," which Williams called "a bug.")
So where exactly is Twitter's cash-worthy value coming from? Williams seems to think it's inherent.
"The number of interesting things we can do with Twitter blows my mind," he said.
Odd. At that very moment, I was thinking just the opposite.
— Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution
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