So I found Twitter. Actually I've had the account there since September 2008 but at that time I was only going to use it for personal tweets but apparently my personal life isn't relevant enough to get anyone to follow me. It's either that or my tweets were just totally uninteresting that no one really cared to follow me. Actually it was probably a combination of both.
Then on February 26th I was watching Rick Sanchez from CNN use Twitter live on-air and I realized two things 1) using such a simple web application would be a neat way to provide developer updates on the games that I administer over and 2) why didn't I ever think of creating Twitter myself? I do that a lot actually. Every time I hear about a neat little startup website that's gaining massive popularity I snap my fingers and think, "Darn, I should have thought of that." But Twitter started around March of 2006 which was the same time that Cyber Nations was getting started so I guess it worked out that I focused on browser based games rather than micro-blogging.
What I found astounding is that even though Twitter is like 1,000x more popular that Cyber Nations they currently have absolutley no business model. According to the Twitter wiki, "As of January 2009, the service sold no advertising and produced no revenue." That's totally mind boggling given that, according to wiki, "$57 million of Twitter is owned by venture capitalists".
I guess the idea, like Facebook and other similar sites, is to ignore the fact that the site isn't generating any money and just grow, grow away. Then when the site gets big enough and the developers wake up and think, "Holy crap, we're freaking $57 million in the hole and like, haven't made a dime in the 3+ years that we've been running this thing" sell away all their user's private information and slap a bunch of 'in-your face' banner ads across the site. I'm not talking about ads like you see on Cyber Nations either. I'm talking about the kind of obnoxious ads that cover the entire background of the site or even worse the kind of ads that popup on your screen or even worst than that in the middle of a video that you are watching or even worse yet in the middle of a forum thread that you are reading.
Anyways, you should all follow me on Twitter now because I've totally read the Top 10 Tips to be a good Twitterer and so I'm going to use it to provide quick tweets on what I'm doing/thinking/working/watching/eating/ and whatever else I can think of from now through eternity. (well, at least until the good people at Twitter realize that their website isn't making ANY MONEY and shut the whole thing down.)
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