Open House: Archives

I remember a conversation I had with an acquaintance over a decade ago. "Amazon.com will never amount to anything," stated the man, a stock broker, "it's a company that captures market share by giving things away." Free shipping and discounts were helping Amazon get customers but not helping them make money and never would. (He was right for a few years, at least.)

Fast forward, then, to another conversation I had about other dot coms. "Yes, mom," I related over my land-based telephone, "I did get 70 pounds of kitty litter from Pets.com... and I'm waiting for HomeGrocer to deliver a bunch of heavy stuff, too. Why? Because it's cheap and there's no shipping! Those companies are doomed." (I was right, which was unfortunate given the number of Pets.com banners my agency was getting paid to produce at around that time. (HomeGrocer, interestingly enough, is now owned by Amazon.))

And, then, almost a year and a half ago, I had a conversation about Twitter. There is no single quote to sum up the chat I had with my friend, but it was about how Twitter might generate revenues and even, perhaps, make money. How the company can take the 20 characters in a txt message and convert them to dollars. How it can avoid losing money by giving things away: server space, bandwidth, and user experience improvements. There was no kitty litter albatross and there was no cut-throat competition with brick-and-mortars, but the underlying issue remained.

In December, things shifted, with Bing and Google paying Twitter $25m for its feed (known, fittingly, as the "Firehose"). Of course, a company like RealNetworks has managed to sign licensing deals, too. And that doesn't always end well.

Today, Twitter announced its @anywhere platform, which gives other sites access to the Firehose. Will this undermine the value of the deals Bing and Google made with Twitter? Will this be a big payday for Twitter, or will their efforts get snowed under by the Facebook juggernaut and/or nibbled to death by its innumerable, smaller competitors? Or something in between?

I'm not sure--no one is--but as I noticed that Amazon.com is an @Anywhere launch partner, I remembered that sometimes it's too early to write off a company with a strong market presence and no sock puppet mascot.