The Business of Twitter

So ya wanna read more about this amazing thing called Twitter?

Steven Levy, who wrote the great 2006 book on Apple and the Ipod called "The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness" offers up interesting analyses on Twitter in his Wired story "Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter".

He writes that "...according to internal documents leaked earlier this year, the company expects to have 25 million active users by the end of 2009 and 100 million by the end of 2010. In 2013, it hopes to become the first Internet service to sign up 1 billion users."

Wow - that's a lot of users! And this comes about all the while Twitter's hit a numerical milestone of 5 billion tweets (writes CNET's The Social)!

More from the Wired piece on Twitter's future plans:

"Williams and Stone, as you’d suspect, don’t want Twitter to become a commodity. They want to amplify Twitter so it’s as vital to your social life as Facebook and as important to your search as Google. “We want to make Twitter indispensable, so it tells people what they need to know and what they want to know and hopefully not much else,” Williams says.

If Twitter does that, he believes, the company will be wildly profitable, no matter what the skeptics say. Last summer Williams was invited to the exclusive Allen & Company confab of bigwigs in Sun Valley, Idaho. He was astonished to hear Barry Diller and John Malone, two pillars of the pre-Internet world, proclaiming that Twitter would never make much money. “I didn’t argue my case,” Williams says. “But all the Internet guys there were laughing at those media guys. Are you kidding? Do you understand how money flows to the Internet? When you know that Twitter is a vehicle for directing information and traffic to large audiences, you realize there’s obviously a huge business.”

Fascinating stuff - old media, say hello to new media. Again.