Mike Butcher

Today’s FT article estimates Twitter is sending – conservatively – 70,000 text messages a day across its service. If, as Ed French commented on this blog, each text costs a minimum of 1p to send, Twitter is burning through 700 quid a day or $1,379.57, or $38,627.96 a month. It could in fact be three times as much if they are using a more robust SMS gateway service which costs more like 3p a text, or $115,883.88. All this for (apparently) no return since there is no advertising on the messages, none on the web pages (as far as I remember, since today the service is down because of all the media attention it’s getting) and no subscription business model either. As I said before, Twitter is really onto something here, especially the API aspect, but now I’m wondering if this isn’t just starting to smell like a dotcom era story. The one thing in their favour right now is great mojo and press, and an ability to capture the community. They just need to work out what to do next – the hard bit. Or maybe they just sell it for squillions and someone else has to…

Twitter is a great service. Simple to set up. Easy to use. It’s based on SMS messaging, which is dead simple. But it’s a printing press for bores who tell you they are eating lunch. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s one of the first SMS systems with an API which creative programmers can put to good use. Thus, we have BBC Tech updates, Tube line Twitters, you name it. Now we even have Twitter Maps and Twitter vision. Great stuff. And hey, if you don’t like all the Twittering you can always turn it off, right? Personally I just re-route the ‘lunch eaters’ to a dedicated RSS reader like Twitterific and keep the more interesting Twitterers on my mobile. But Twitter is now having to pay to send out millions of SMS text messages a day on an almost global basis. They are getting no revenue from this, indeed it is a massive cost (unless I’m missing something?). So Twitter is going to have to find a way of making this work, or they are Twitter Toast.

Being a journo, for some reason people seem to think I know about content. This means that increasingly I get asked to help the odd organisation out with ideas, content and speakers for events. I don’t do this ALL the time, but once in a while I am tempted to help out, such as with NMK Forum in July.

So here are a couple of other events I am programming this year. Feel to free to get in touch if you think you might be able to contribute in some way.

Event 1: Working title “The Dark Side Of Social Media: How MySpace, Bebo and the rest went bad” (I’m really looking forward to doing this one)

Event 2: “Mososo: Mobile Social Software and the future of social media” (Another topic close to my heart. Yes, I know, keep taking the pills… etc)

Next week I’m chairing an event for Chinwag.com called PPC Earthquake, which is more interesting than it sounds, considering Pay-Per Click advertising is the source of Google’s billions…

“The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams…” is a new series of films by Adam Curtis (“The Power of Nightmares”, “Century of the Self”) that tells the story of the rise of today’s narrow idea of freedom. It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War. It was then taken up by genetic biologists (like Richard Dawkins), anthropologists, radical psychiatrists and free market economists, until it became a new system of invisible control. Highly recommended. Here’s a review, the Wiki page and the BBC page. The end result – says this vision – is that governments are no longer in control and the market can’t save us either. Fab.

Today I’m off to cover CeBit in Hannover, Germany, (the big electronics trade show) for a few days.

I’m currently doing some blogging for the New Statesman New Media Awards web site. Come on over if you are interested in entering the awards this year.

Mobile Today has a neat graphic for subscriber takeup in the UK:

However, where is 3? As Ed Cross says:

What it looks really interesting is the total cumulative amount of subscribers in the study to be 66.7 million, this number does not consider "3", lets add maybe another 5 million for their probable share?, Tesco Mobile, Dot Mobile, and any other MVNO's i am not aware of (EasyMobile closed last december), lets add 1 million for these group?. So the total approximate number of UK subscribers maybe is set at around 73 Million, big wow! This is what i call real market penetration.

Or so says Tomi Ahonen on Communities dominate brands:

Mobile as the 7th mass media is as much superior to the internet, as TV is to radio. Today at 2.7 billion mobile phone users, there are three times as many mobile phones as personal computers (and over a quarter of all internet access is already from mobile phones). There are nearly twice as many mobile phones as TV sets. Twice as many people use messaging on a phone (SMS text messaging) as use e-mail on the web. But mobile was first a communication device. It emerged as the 7th mass media only by the year 2000. By far the youngest of the seven mass media, the mobile is also by far the least understood.

Don’t have time to read the whole thing? His argument is neatly summarised by Nic Brisbourne thus:

1. The mobile is a uniquely identifiable device – so personalisation and targeting can be an order of magnitude better. Every time you go back to a site it recognises your number. The media owner can know with 100% accuracy when you visited his site and what you did whilst you were there. No need to worry about cookies.

2. It is always on and always with you – so you can have alert services. Apparently seven out of ten people sleep with their mobile within arms reach – and most of them literally have their phone in bed with them.

3. The phone has a built in payments channel – twice as many people have phones as credit cards and their is no 18 year age limit – combine this with unique identification and the result is truly revolutionary

4. Mobile makes media input and creation unbelievably easy and convenient. Simply snap and post to your blog or Flickr.