Shall we talk Twitter?

[Breand]

Talk is a $25 price with 14B valuation. I think the valuation is still low. The company has a ton of upside and supposedly had a great IPO presentation that showed very intriguing ways to make money...

[Vanraw]

I did not try to get into the IPO. Did you guys?

I think your right. Upside. They seem to be betting on the bump as a plan. Its interesting because of all the hoopla related to FB IPO, FB probably did it right compared to other tech IPO's that bound out of the starting gate. The guys the fly out of the starting gate basically make a lot of money for wallstreet, not the company. FB seemed to try and price itself at reality. Twitter seems to be going for the "get wallstreet fat".

But I think your right, if yo7u got in, you will do well. I don't think I will buy it, and I will probabably regret it like I regretted stopping myself from buying FB at 20.

[Grieve]

Etrade didn't offer a buy in, so I didn't join this one. I probably would have otherwise. I still have the FB shares I bought on IPO day, and which are (finally) making a good profit. I think twitter will do better than FB going forward...FB is definitely fading amongst teens. Then again, all my oldest daughter's friends are into Instagram, which FB owns.

What I'm really interested in is Pinterest. My wife and every female friend of hers (and even a few male friends) are addicted to it.

[Vanraw]

Thing about Twitter is the ad revenue is not there. At least not at the FB or Google levels.

Question is would you guys buy it today now that it almost doubled in 1 day.

[Grieve]

Nope. But I might if it dips.

FB had crappy mobile ad revenue when they went public. They've improved it a lot. To me it just means that Twitter has a lot of opportunity.

[Jakensama]

I think that twitter is the next worst thing to the holocaust so I am not too familiar, what is their proposal to monitize it? Do most people actually go to the website? I always see tweets outside of the website where there would be no ability to advertize.

[Breand]

They currently have about the same market cap right now as LinkedIn, and I see Twitter has having a much stronger position than them by a pretty huge margin. Not sure of the exact details for monetizing but I heard investors were impressed by their pitch. Now that they are public, I'm sure they will be going full court press on that. One of the big things I feel that gives them an advantage is it's one of the best places for celebrities to interact with fans so I think there will be a lot of advertising, sponsorship revenue that comes from that. I also think it is better placed for longevity than even Facebook.

[Slamz]

My worry with Twitter is that it has a similar weakness to Facebook, but much moreso: it's a service that's built on a concept that's not unique and it could go away [become unpopular and get replaced] just as easily as any other online messaging service.

Facebook at least has some anchor in that there's a sense of investment -- you've built up your profile and you have all these photos and a long history of events and messages that you may be loath to recreate on some other service. Twitter has connections but those are easily remade on a new service. There's nothing I see really tying users to it.

Probably the most interesting thing that could happen to Twitter would be for some other service (like Facebook or Google) to eventually buy them.


Still, "short broadcast text messaging" is popular and probably not going away any time soon. Twitter's advantage over Facebook is that they don't have the bulky overhead. You don't get spammed by your Aunt's religious meme shares or photos of people's cats. It's just short text messages which I suspect is why people like it.

But then again, that also suggests that they could easily ruin it if they monetize it in the wrong way. If they make it annoying, I believe people can and will jump ship quickly.