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A comment on Doubts About Twitter the Business.

Re:Doubts About Twitter the Business by nir on Thursday March 19, 2009 @11:17AM (#523389)
Favorite quote: "Sanford Bernstein’s bearish approach is based on its belief the Web 2.0 model of building something and then figuring out a way to make money is no longer valid."

IIRC, that was supposed to be our lesson from the dot.com bubble :) The early hype about "Web 2.0" was that this time around we're doing it for cheap and with a revenue model...

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Re:Doubts About Twitter the Business by preview on Thursday March 19, 2009 @11:34AM (#523426)
I disagree. The lesson from the dot.com bubble was that anything put on the Internet could be monetized and would become profitable. That was (and is) silly.

The "Web 2.0" mindset, at least the mindset I've seen most often on HN, is build it fast and get it out there to see if it has value. I also think there is some thought to how the solution can be monetized, but plans change in response to changing environments.

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Re:Doubts About Twitter the Business by nir on Thursday March 19, 2009 @12:47PM (#523585)
Yes, but how do you judge if it has value? It seems that, as in the dot.com era, it's still not judged by income, but by number of users (or just level of hype - Twitter only has ~6 million users).

Current technology does make this valid in some sense - you can launch very cheaply and, if you attract enough interest, get bought by a larger company. As I understand this is YC's general approach. But it seems that Twitter tends to refuse buyout offers, so I they are more of a classic dot.com.

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Re:Doubts About Twitter the Business by ryanwaggoner on Thursday March 19, 2009 @12:37PM (#523558)
The "Web 2.0" mindset, at least the mindset I've seen most often on HN, is build it fast and get it out there to see if it has value.

Sadly, this is not the Web 2.0 mindset. If it was things like Twitter and Facebook would have been "monetized" a few months after their launch, when it was abundantly clear that they offered value to people.

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