http://benmyles.disqus.com/enWed, 21 May 2008 14:05:03 -0000http://benmyles.com/post/33195820#comment-504593<p>commodity? no, bandwidth is the commodity and people *do* pay for text (sms) in a very "un"commodity-like fashion. think about that again, people have a "willingness to pay" for text - even if it is a very peculiar granularity of datum / bandwidth / computation. compare that with a willingness to pay for snippets of music - ringtones, say - and you can see very different values &amp; willingness to pay for different granularity of data ($2.99 for a ringtone and 99 cents for the mp3 and 10 bucks for the WAV on a CD) ...</p><p>that twitter can deploy a system which truncates the size of a message text to 140 characters and take a split with the carrier is *building* a business ... they reduced the size that a user has traditionally identified as being a message text and added features to build the business of tweet ...</p><p>in this case "relevance" "reputation" "recognition" - the concept of "universal time" - the wide cast of alleged "twitter" personality-types or characters that are quite simply just like you &amp; me ... it is all very interesting but alas just another way to communicate ... to internet</p><p>far from a commodity and unlike blogging in general ... the business will survive because it replaces in a succinct and effective manner the notion of "location location location" - even though it is a "network" platform in every sense of the word ...</p><p>with due respect, you missed the very important issue that twitter must maintain to survive - trust ...</p><p>some questions per chance</p><p>what do you think the split with the carrier on the text is? what percentage of users would prefer a different split (say i want more money to go to twitter than the carrier &amp; am willing to pay in lieu of advertising? - my at&amp;t dsl service doesn't get that yet - i say "no" to at&amp;t marketing since i already pay for the service that i want - send the "spam"/"marketing promotion" bandwidth waste to those willing to tolerate it - twitter may face this at some point soon as they seek to scale)? how would you compare this to how apple &amp; att worked out their platform &amp; splits for both hardware and use?</p><p>don't discount the signal (or signal callers) for the noise of the message and the medium ... nice article!</p>moskowitzWed, 21 May 2008 14:05:03 -0000