Exploring Twitter's potential as a business model and advertising platform based on exposing users to new and unexpected content.
I got sucked in the by the title of this article ("
Can ‘Serendipity’ Be a Business Model? Consider Twitter"), but I'm not sure it lives up. About a year ago I was doing a lot of research into serendipity, and most interestingly (to me at least) was that the definition is "the ability to find things you didn't know you were looking for." I do think Twitter is a pretty genius solution to this. By essentially allowing you to overhear conversations it exposes you to a kind of ambient data that is otherwise hard to come by. When it comes to their ad model, this will clearly be a big part of the value. But I think the way they're positioning it (in this article at least) as being about intent is totally wrong. Twitter's value is not about intent, in the classic funnel definition, it's much more about awareness and interest: About exposing you to new products and services you didn't know you were interested in. If Twitter can actually deliver this it has a truly differentiated ad product, but I worry they're following the Google model too much and thinking too low in the funnel.