TWITTER FOUNDERS TO WRITE BOOK IN 140 CHARACTERS OR LESS

April 5 2009

San Francisco, CA – There’s little doubt that Twitter has become the latest darling of the web community. With massive user growth and with everyone from the Al Gore to Ashton Kutcher to M.C. Hammer sending regular Tweets the mind share of the microblogging site has increased exponentially over the last six months. Revenue growth though hasn’t expanded in the same way as its exposure and that has led
many to question the long term viability of the site. Now though the sites founders are plotting a very short route to generating revenue.

Despite the courting from major companies like Facebook and Google, Twitter has defiantly remained single sustaining itself on money from wealthy admirers. While those dollars will continue to roll in as long as the site stays vibrant, eventually it will be necessary for the site to start earning its own money and its founders are starting to move in that direction with a very short book.

“Generating traffic on the web is one thing but creating revenue from that traffic has always been the difficult thing. Product oriented sites such as Amazon have done well because they offer established services in a different medium. For web
based software companies though the model has not been fully developed and so money is a tough go, which no doubt is what Twitter is finding,” said Scrape TV Technology analyst Ken Kevins. “Web companies are still looking for that magic formula to bring in the dollars that has been elusive really from the start. Ancillary products are a good start, but writing a book isn’t going to generate the millions of dollars that are required to keep that site up and running never mind expand its growth. Of course they always produce a series of 140 character books, keep people coming back for more.”

Though not officially unveiled, the book will reportedly document the development of the site from its early development days to its current control of the web zeitgeist. The book will be co-authored by the sites three developers, Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and published author Isaac ‘Biz’ Stone. There is no word on the page count for the work, though it is expected that at the very least the chapters will be extremely short.

“This is the time to strike for the founders. Interest is at an all time high and pretty
much anything they have to say at this point is going to generate a whole lot of
interest. They will likely have a lot of difficulty in selling to book to people who are used to reading complete sentences and paragraphs but for their user base it should be a smash,” continued Kevins. “The advantage of merchandising is that it allows a company to extend their brand. Not only do they generate revenue off the sales but the usage of said product and its presence in the media brings more interest to the main product, which in turn provides more marketing opportunities. The main advantage too is they don’t need to sit around and worry about structure or focus because that is the opposite of what Twitter users are used to experiencing.”

In a related story Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is also reportedly planning a book about the development of that site though has had trouble with the production due to the lack of inline linking.

“It’s going to be an interesting phenomenon to see new media people try to integrate with old media standards. So far the two disciplines have been largely exclusive but as the new forms of media presentation become more and more ubiquitous and traditional media continues to decline the fusion of two is inevitable,” continued Kevins. The real question though as always isn’t whether or not to two philosophies can be fused, but whether or not that can be done in a way that engages the audience in a viable and compelling way. Without that you just have confusion.”

Other Web 2.0 companies have toyed with the idea of writing books but, as in the case of Facebook, found that applications didn’t really work in print.

Martin Philton, Technology Correspondent

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