the onda

This crazy silliness of Twitter taking over a realtime version of what Google has done for webpages has got to stop. Yes it is a great service that has created a valuable layer abstraction between people's extended and overlapping addressbooks that can sometimes deliver an awesome level of serendipitous shared context in close to realtime. Yes it further lowers the bar for "publishing" by continuing to blur the distinction between communication and content creation.

But at the end of the day, it's just a very thin little app with a medium number of people on it— still far from crossing into the mainstream.

And most important of all, as my friend Andy recently wrote, disruptive innovation does not happen in isolation of the incumbents, and in this case Google would be absolutely idiotic not to be paying attention to the value of realtime indexing of status updates. And unfortunately for Twitter, once they do I think it will be easy for them to add realtime to search (or any of their other products) and suck the unique power of Twitter right out from under them.

Finally, on the $50MM incremental investment as proof that Twitter is going to be "something huge." Venture guys are not stupid and in this new climate most of the ones in the consumer online space have turned into momentum investors where ever deal that shows any real adoption traction is still getting bid up too much. In this case though, I'd be willing to bet that one of the new investors has a real strong "feeling" that Twitter is going to be bought, either by Google or Microsoft in the next 12 months. It won't be a homerun investment for them— but it will not be bad and also help to garner their fund more street cred in the consumer online space.

Because one thing is clear to me— Twitter is not a billion dollar business about to happen. It is an interesting tweak that belongs inside one of the big information portals and at this very moment I am sure there are people at each of these big companies tweaking their "Twitter killer" strategies (or getting their M&A ducks in a row).