It’s Not What You’re Looking For, But What You Find

Jason Calacanis has some ideas for Twitter monetization. Namely, in feed advertising, SMS advertising and subscriptions. But that’s not the interesting part of his post. This is:

Ev shouldn’t worry about a business model for another two years. Just build the service to *massive* critical mass. Get to 100M users–which is where the service is headed. If the service gets to 100M monthly users it will be worth a couple of billion.

That’s what I learned at AOL: Once you have critical mass you can’t help but make a fortune. An absolute idiot with 10-20M users can make a ton of money. So, get to tens of millions of users and forget about money.

Speaking of Ev, The Economist is running a feature on him. The British magazine’s premise is that Ev is an accidental innovator. That Blogger and Twitter were not intended, but rather the outcome of something else he was working on.

The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things.

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