Microsoft employee views on Twitter

Living in Seattle you know or meet people that work at Microsoft pretty regularly.  On a few occasions, I've been talking with Microsoft people when the topic of Twitter came up.  Here are some of the things I heard and my responses.

"What is the big deal about a website entirely devoted to status updates?"

It isn't just status updates anymore.  The beginning premise was to answer the question "What are you doing?" which in itself is a interesting question but Twitter has become much more than that.  It's become the medium in which ideas, links, stories, etc. propogate across the web.  Look at all the websites that are integrating it especially the bigger mainstream websites.  I mean they even plug it on Pardon the Interruption on ESPN (love that show).

Also the immediacy (is that a word?) of the service makes it a powerful to place to get information as it happens.  Literally as it happens.  I mean look at this "status update" from a guy literally picking people up on a ferry after that plane crashed into the Hudson - http://twitter.com/jkrums/status/1121915133.  30 minutes later he was being interviewed by MSNBC.  What other service get's us that close to real-time information?

"How is it any different from Facebook status updates?  Can't I just use that instead?"

Facebook statuses aren't the same thing as Twitter.  Remember that in order for people to see my Facebook statuses they need to be my friend first.  Which means they need to send me a request and I get to decide if they see it or not.  On Twitter my statuses are public and the majority of followers are people who've never met the person they are following.  It's a subtle point but it makes all the difference.  The above twitter message would never have received the 443,409 views it did if it was his Facebook status, not everyone can see it and no one can link to it.

Also on a side note, products aren't redundant or the same just because one is a feature of another.  The value of a product has as much to do with what features aren't in it's feature set as it does with those that are in it.  Good products choose their feature sets very carefully in order to shape and encourage how users will use it.  How you package a group of features together is just as important as the features themselves.. maybe more so.

"They have no idea how to monetize it.  How are you going to monetize something like that?"

I don't work there but neither do they.  We have no idea whether they have an idea for monetization but look anytime you have that many people using a product and it has as rich a dataset as Twitter has there is a way to make money.  I already have a few ideas that would be so fun to work on.  Worse comes to worse they can run huge ads like Myspace and I bet they will be profitable.

I feel like this is the defacto way for people to bring down products.  Yes they don't make any money now but that doesn't mean they will never make money or have no idea how to make money.  They are just looking for a killer way to make money like Google's adsense.  Making enough money to keep the company going as it is isn't interesting.  How do you make enough money to take the company and product to the next level?

"We would never buy Twitter.  Google would be stupid to buy them, just like they were stupid to buy YouTube"

First about Youtube - Yes, YouTube is losing money and lots of it quickly.  It also owns and I mean OWNS the video market on the web.  Video even now is just now making it's way onto the web (look how many people watched the NCAA tournament on the web this year) and YouTube is king.  Paying YouTube's current operating costs is a continued investment towards that future.  I think this will pay-off later.  $1.65 billion though?  Maybe a tad high =)

It's in my humble opinion that Microsoft should at least enertain the idea of purchasing Twitter.  I think Twitter has an extremely interesting and vibrant dataset.  That's what Google is interested in, they're mission statement "is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."  Twitter is a really interesting representation of the world's information.  One that typically can't be captured by crawling web pages.  If Microsoft was able to own this dataset their search will have the ability to crawl it completely and frequently while not allowing Google to do the same.  This circumvents Google's obvious technological advantage by denying them access to the data.

Microsoft's search is actually losing market share.  Competitive advantages in search today are so few and far between, this one might be big.