Could Twitter be a platform for mobile payments?
July 1, 2008 – 10:39 am
A great article today from Silicon Alley Insider called How Twitter Could Be Worth A Billion In A Year [via Mediapost]
I’m a huge fan of Twitter, and I agree that Twitter has potential for being a platform for mobile payments.
Not sure what Twitter is?
You can check out my Twitter presentation or create a Twitter account and follow me on Twitter to learn more. I also have my interactions in the twitterverse posted to my blog and Facebook page.
Below is the summary from Mediapost:
Twitter is undoubtedly the hottest Web property with no revenue model. Silicon Alley Insider’s Nate Westheimer suggests that the microblogging service move into the peer-to-peer mobile payments space, where “no one has much of a head start.”
So what are P2P mobile payments? Think PayPal for your phone. What does this have to do with Twitter? At first glance, not much, really, except for the fact that Twitter is widely used on mobile phones. As Westheimer says, “Twitter is far from being a ubiquitous mobile platform, but they have more penetration and usage than any other mobile service and their current user base is the same important group of technology early adopters that PayPal enjoyed when it convinced the world that you could send money to an email address.”
Forget for a moment that the Twitter infrastructure often fails, and consider the implications of a carrier-independent mobile messaging system. This is effectively what Twitter could achieve when the re-architecting “is all said and done,” making it a powerful alternative to social and mobile SMS text messages. As more and more people become familiar with the Twitter language, the microblogging service could easily become the de facto platform for mobile payments. Imagine simply sending a message like “p innonate $5″ to pay for a beer at a bar?
Technorati Tags: Twitter, mobile, payment, sms
2 Responses to “Could Twitter be a platform for mobile payments?”
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Dave Winer, father of RSS says “Twitter, as it was conceived, was never meant to live.”
“It’s very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially.”
So is the end of Twitter getting near? I hope not. Twitter I hope that you are listening and you better start taking things more seriously.
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Here’s my two cents.
For instance there are about 100m users of yahoo messenger and usually 2-3 of them talk at a time that means scalability of 300m conversations. On the other hand with 100m twitter users who usually send messages to 100-10,000 other users the scalability required is 10,000m to 10^6m I have never known any current architecture based on webservers to handle such a scale. So according to me Twitter was never meant to live. It is like a concept car that will never see production. Users of twitter don’t understand this and they don’t care.
They don’t know whats happening when the website is down. The sad part is that the best analysts claim that Twitter is a billion dollar company in one year of operations. There is an old saying before the days of when people understood permutation combinations. One peasant asked a king to give him rice equal to the total amount gotten by placing double the number of rice grains on a chess square than the previous square, starting with one rice grain. There are 8×8=64 squares. We seriously need to visit grade 7 mathematics.
I know of only one News/Messaging system that supports around 1 billion users sending messages to all 1 billion users each. Thats a scalability of 10^12m. It is not Web based but rather on a massively scalable serverless P2P architecture based. The team is soft spoken and when I last talked to them I was told that they don’t care about money or hype or fame but rather for just the passion of next generation global systems that will stand the test of worldwide use. Its called Mermaid News Mermaid
They have other softwares too but this post is about Twitter and Messaging. Once everyone comprehends basic mathematics that goes behind scalable algorithms they would go past the flashy screen and hype to actually want a system they can trust. To the analysts I would say it is easy to create a business plan, create a hype and raise $20m funding it is far more difficult to create something of use.
By Peter Parker on Jul 2, 2008
I don’t really see it either. I think a credit card company pairing up with a cellular carrier would have a better chance. I bet they could do something really cool with bluetooth. And throwing it together with Microsoft Surface would be cool times 10!
By Kyle on Jul 2, 2008