I don't think this product is targeted at peer to peer money transfers for individuals. It's for businesses who want to charge customers. The pizza delivery guy or the taxi driver who, today, copies down your credit card number or "calls it in" for example.

Credit cards allow you to loan money but I think that's ridiculous. I don't want to have a debt every time I buy something, I just want to pay immediately, with the money I already have, not with money that I don't have.

Before Twitter came along, I would regularly change my IM status to a nice quote, a link to a nice news story or a link to a cool website. Many people do this. Twitter makes it easy to broadcast something like this to hundreds of people, makes it all searchable and encourages conversation. It serves as an outlet for random thoughts and observations that are too insignificant to fit into a blog post. A "stream of consciousness", if you will. Collectively, Twitter is the entire Internet's stream of consciousness.

I find Twitter is a great way for staying in touch, too. Why? Because it simple. Very, very simple.

Actually there wasn't a lot of luck. Twitter is something that users actually wanted: a broadcast "status" update that wasn't just on their instant message client.

Twitter is successful because they remained positive and persevered while other people capable of making a similar system didn't do anything about it. Grumpy programmers just posted confused blog posts and forum comments about it. "Twitter? Huh? I don't get it." Nobody really tried to compete with them head on, and they still don't have any real competition. People say facebook is their main competition, and they are right, but Facebook has so much baggage of being something else that isn't Twitter that it seems unlikely people will ever consciously choose between one or the other. More likely people will use both services.

It's a bit of luck that anyone cares about posting their status online but it's not really luck that they are using Twitter to do so... What else would they use?

That idea didn't work. Hence I would definitely agree that a lot of luck resulted in Twitter being repurposed as an broadcaster of impersonal information to people who you don't know. (which is pretty much the opposite of the original intent).

I'm not sure we can even call it a success yet. It's certainly getting popular, but in terms of ROI? Well, we'll have to wait and see if it generates any revenue.

Making something people want is great, but it's only half the battle. You have to be able to translate that into something they want that you can make money from. Twitter hasn't shown they have any clue how to do that yet.

There are no guarantees, but one startling insight could indicate he has more. Plus, I like this idea...

Small retailers will snap this up and avoid the evil merchant companies. All of the inventory management and reporting lives in the cloud. Right now, besides opentable, all of the POS stuff is either really expensive or garbage.

The only comparable thing right now is a Symbol MC70 with Windows Mobile and an external swiper. Apple retail uses them and they are $3k+ a pop. You can get some knock of Pidion 1300s for $1200. All the software is "enterprise" garbage.

This device will be given away at cost. Pair it with an ipod touch and small business climb on board in mass. A whole new slew of small business, babysitters, and freelancers will accept credit cards.

They cleanup in merchant fees at the very least, and quite possibly create the holy grail of mobile-to-mobile payments -- all nicely integrated into twitter.

Most freelancers I work with (granted: high tech folks, generally) already do. Paypal, how I love you, let me count the ways...

Speaking of which: if you want to be extra special nice to your favorite freelancer, pay them through Paypal's batch interface. It reduces the cost to receive the money from essentially 2.9% of the transaction to a flat fee of $1. When you're settling up $2000 invoices, that means a significant amount of money in their pocket rather than Paypal's. All it takes is for you to write a one-line text file and click a button on Paypal.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_batch-payment-ove...

Innerfence's product is definitely the best of the bunch. However, all of the card processing apps on the app store , including Innerfence's, just talk to the Authorize.net payment system. Another one also supports paypal in addition to authorize.net.

As someone who has built both iPhone apps and built apps which use authorize.net for payment processing, I'll say that this isn't trivial, but it certainly isn't a huge challenge if you know what you are doing.

Thus, I can't help but think there must be something else to Dorsey's idea.

I think he has something more up his sleeve.

I remember reading that it was an idea ahead of its time due to the lack of spread of mobile computing. Now that phones are getting smarter, maybe it has a better chance.