We have been keeping track of the public Twitter timeline for a few months now. Until a few days all Twist showed was a 7-day window, but now you can select monthly and historical trends. For example, it seems that in late April people start talking more about the summer than about the spring:
Web apps are a lot like TV shows. In particular those that are supported by ads, because their source of revenue is the same and the viewer/user is not really the customer but the product. These days it seems that everyone has some advice for Twitter about possible business models. I really don’t think the folks at Twitter need to worry about that, if they don’t find one that works they should just focus on making the company a good acquisition target.
If you come up with an idea for a TV show and even put together a pilot, nobody asks what the business model should be because it’s obvious. A TV show is made to be sold to a network, who will in turn monetize it with ads. Why can’t you just skip that step and monetize it yourself? Simply because you don’t own the infrastructure required to broadcast a TV show. You could try to build it, but clearly it doesn’t make sense if all you have is just one show.
Now look at Google, Yahoo and MSN as the multimedia networks that they are. They have a system in place to monetize many of their offerings. Plus, they benefit from the economies of scale. Today you wouldn’t start a company to build something like Yahoo Finance. I don’t know how much revenue Yahoo Finance generates, but it doesn’t need to be much to be profitable given that the incremental cost for Yahoo to keep it running isn’t very high. Gmail is probably not very profitable but it’s still very useful to Google (brand awareness, data mining, playground for new ideas, etc).
What could a company like Google or Yahoo do with Twitter? In a way Twitter has a “search” component to it. You can ask people a question such as “what do you think about X?” and if you have a few followers you’ll probably get some answers that may start a conversation to refine the “results”. You cannot do that with an automated search engine. I’m sure it’s possible to use your recent tweets as one more input to give you better search results and show you more relevant ads (not necessarily on Twitter but on other applications). Also, there is a lot of information worth mining in Twitter but you don’t need to acquire the company to extract it :)
In short, building a product to sell to one company is a valid business model. It’s risky, like creating a piece of art that perhaps nobody will like. You only have one product that you can sell to at most one client. As long as you understand the risk and have investors who believe in your idea, there’s nothing wrong with it. Perhaps it’s a good time for large companies to start thinking of new applications like Television pilots. They should encourage small teams with good ideas to work on “pilot” web applications (like what Ycombinator does, but perhaps with a larger budget). If they like the “pilot”, they already own a chunk of it and can acquire the rest.
When I think of a successful web application, I picture one that has millions of users and runs smoothly (it works fast and it does not crash). Of course, very few are like this. Perhaps the first example that comes to mind is something like Google Search. In the following chart, Google Search is in the deep south and far east:
The above chart depicts four possible stages of the life of a web app. My guess is that the vast majority of all web apps never leave the northwest. Someone throws some php (or Ruby, whatever) together with a database schema and has a proof-of-concept up in a few hours or days. In many cases this is just fine. Maybe your boss wants some internal tool to keep track of inventory, or perhaps you have an idea that you want to show potential investors to see if it’s worth pursuing.
Some applications are in the northeast. This is usually a bad place to be, because it means that you spent a lot of effort creating a highly scalable application. Perhaps you and your team had long architectural meetings in which you imagined how you would take over the world. Your app would be distributable, you came up with an efficient database design and perhaps a caching mechanism for when you get dugg or slashdotted. As it turned out, you built it and they didn’t come. The uptime command on your server shows a system load of 0.00, and you could invite all your site’s visitors to have dinner at your place.
In the southwest quadrant we have applications like Twitter today, or Friendster a few years back. Because these applications need to grow more or less proportionally to the square of the number of users, things can get out of hand pretty quickly. Regardless, this is a good problem to have, as moving from the southwest from the southeast tends to be easier than moving from the north to the south. You’ve built something that people like, so you may be able to convince others to give you the funds you need to organize the move.
Of course the chart is a continuum. Twitter is still far from the southernmost point, and perhaps it will never get there unless the move to the east goes well. Where is your web app on this chart, and how do you plan to move to the southeast?
Twist got a lot of traffic today, as it made it to the top of del.icio.us/popular. Here are very positive comments from del.icio.us users. It’s fun to look at the logs and see what people are comparing. Also, moving it to Amazon EC2 was a good idea as the traffic is not a problem at all.
We just released a fun tool called Twist. If you are familiar with Google Trends, it should be obvious what it does. It allows you to track trends on Twitter over the past week, with a granularity of a couple of hours. While testing the tool we saw spikes in the charts whenever an interesting story broke (especially about technology or celebrities). We discovered trends such as the fact that people who Twitter tend to have lunch rather than breakfast on weekdays, but both are mentioned equally on weekends:
This tool is coupled with our Twitter search engine, so you can see what people are saying about the concepts shown in the charts. We really like Twitter and we are excited about this project, so stay tuned for more improvements.
Wordpress just launched a blog search service for the almost 3M blogs they host on the site. It’s powered by Hounder, the open-source search engine we have been developing at Flaptor over the past few years. We’ve been working on this for a few months so it’s great to see it live! It’s been a pleasure working with Matt and Toni to make this happen, and it will be fun to see how many blogs get indexed in the future and how Hounder scales to handle the traffic.
We just released a WordPress plugin for our automatic tagger. It’s called TagMahal and it’s available here: tagger.flaptor.com/tagmahal. If you have a blog powered by WordPress, it will suggest tags for a post as you write it. Try it, it’s fun!
Here is a six-minute video about the Semantic Web. The idea is explained in a very simple and concise manner.
I think it’s a neat concept that would become popular if it could be made easy for authors to annotate their content as they go. One problem is that most people can’t even be bothered to tag blog posts, let alone incorporate new tags to describe the types of things they talk about. I believe that a content creation tool that could automatically discover entities such as places, artists, events or book titles would be very helpful in this respect. At Flaptor we are doing research along these lines, it looks like a field that is still in its infancy (pretty much like search engines in the nineties).
At Flaptor we believe in the open source philosophy. This is why we have decided to release our most widely used projects as open source. We have created Flaptor Open Source, an initiative for projects related to information retrieval.
We think this decision will be beneficial to the open source community as well as to our clients. On one hand, the community will be able to take advantage of proven and stable projects such as our search engine Search4j. On the other, we hope that the feedback from the developer and user communities will help us improve the quality, robustness and features of our code. This will benefit our clients, who will be running a better product. As for us, we expect to increase our market share and reach users who otherwise would not have been able to run our software. Of course, we will continue to sell support and customization services.
Through Flaptor Open Source we have already launched a byproduct of our search engine, called Clusterfest. It’s a framework to monitor and control multi-server java programs. Search4j will be available as open source soon, stay tuned!
We just put up a beta version of our autotagging software at tagger.flaptor.com. It is a program that uses machine learning techniques to guess what tags could apply to a blog post or a news article. Please give it a try and tell us what you think!
Some interesting facts about it:
The current algorithm learned from hundreds of thousands of blog posts from different rss feeds, all of them in English. We plan to support other languages soon.
It is slightly biased towards current events, as most posts are from the past few weeks.
If you click on a suggested tag, you will see information regarding what words in the post contributed to that tag. This gives you a hint as to what search engines may think of your post based on the words it contains.
We are very excited about this tool and we will continue to improve it in the near future so stay tuned!
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