Twitter’s New Plan – Offering Promised Gold for Silver Now

The people at Twitter have gone to the big boys on the block, Microsoft and Google, to see if a deal can be struck for some cash, in anticipation of possible data mining for either of those companies.

Pretty sharp.

Amongst all the blather, there might actually be some of that ‘loose lips sink ships’ worthwhile information.

AllThingsD puts it another way -

Is there gold in them thar tweets?

Maybe so, because–according to sources familiar with the situation–Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines.

Sources said a number of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets of its 54 million monthly users.

That includes a number of structures, including a payment of several million dollars to Twitter, along with various revenue-sharing proposals that would give Twitter a piece of the revenue made from search results.

Also, the article tells about the possible over the top overt greed of Twitter, as the company wants to keep the deals non-exclusive, so that it can sell the information to both of the big players.

Is this information management taken to war-like status; similar to the arms dealer that supplies both sides?

Further, the story tells that Microsoft has  already experimented with using Twitter results in conjunction with search engine results -

But, most of all, Silicon Valley’s hot start-up is focusing now on spurring growth and engagement, along with fine-tuning its product offering.

Being deeply integrated into big search services would give Twitter a huge footprint.

Microsoft had already done a small experiment this past summer integrating Twitter data into search results, starting with tweets of bloggers like me.

How much of an indexing of its data Twitter will allow is unclear, but it certainly has bought itself time to think carefully about all its options, given that it now has a lot of money in the bank.

Late last month, Twitter raised another $100 million in new funding, after already have raised $55 million.

This has given it a $1 billion valuation, despite negligible revenue.

And, that valuation effectively stated that the innovative company was pretty much putting itself out of play to be acquired and very interested in forging its own destiny.

If nothing else, this should make you only slightly less than astonished how big business can work – giving a billion dollar valuation to something formed from nothing, and taken as a fluke by many is quite peculiar.

But as the stock market showed (another construct built on little to nothing, with large promises of something) these things are very nebulous.

It has already been shown that an overwhelming majority of tweeting is egocentric, so 99.9% of the information in those 140 character packages could be fluff, with zero value. It remains to be seen what the value of that last 0.01% could be.

Roll the bones.

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Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it’s only good for wallowing in. Katherine Mansfield

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