The Real-time Opportunity w/Ron Conway and John Borthwick – Pt 2
Borthwick: 60-70% volume from Twitter for bit.ly. 27m decodes yesterday. We are thinking about bit.ly broadly, in terms of the API. We’ve spent months working on scaling stuff.
Conway: Stream doesn’t really tell you anything about the social component. Content is being shared through the social web.
Arrington: Naked Truth conference talked about how companies made up. Every company said they buy traffic on Google and convert. The most valuable part of Twitter they can’t pay for.
Borthwick: In my experience the most compelling monetization models have been created online and follow user experience.
Conway: TweetDeck and Seesmic have created dashboards to filter this onslaught of new content and data.
Borthwick: The first filter is a social filter…you pick your followers. Then topical (search). Retweets and similar.
Conway: Churn is huge. All these companies will iterate and reduce churn.
Borthwick: There was a good reason SXSW was a spark plug.
Laura Fitton (@pistachio) asks about Amazon not allowing affiliate links on Twitter. Panelists say it’s only a matter of time before they come to their senses.
Question from audience – Can Twitter be overcome since it’s so early, similar to early search engines (e.g., Alta Vista) being ovetaken by Twitter?
Conway: Twitter has brand.