Finding value in tweets.
A year ago Nate wrote:
Finally, this is all assuming nothing changes with the way the carriers do business. Indeed the ball could be in their court on the subject of mobile payments, because if they set-up their own mobile payment option as a stand-alone service and turned the phone into a credit card, they could sign users up at the point of sale (POS) or any point along the way and really get into an interesting a lucrative business. I say stand-alone because the current set-up with SMS payments feels too much like how sketchy 900 numbers work (WTF is this charge on my bill!?).
Take home point: Phone bill must remain clean and consistant, and mobile payments must be as flexible as an AMEX. Meanwhile, carriers hold the key to this, but likely won’t move very soon and consumers won’t adapt too quickly, so your best best is extending your online presence to the “third screen” and streamlining payments on the back-end.
More recently he wondered whether or not the killer business model for Twitter wasn’t as a mobile payment platform:
Forget infrastructure, forget great partnerships: the most important place a mobile payments system can start with is ubiquity.
Twitter is far from being a ubiquitous mobile platform, but they have more penetration and usage than any other mobile service and their current user base is the same important group of technology early adopters that PayPal enjoyed when it convinced the world that you could send money to an email address.
Two and a half years ago, I asked if telcos were set to become the new banks:
…the mobile phone is likely to be the platform of choice in delivering financial services to hundreds of millions in the developing markets over the next decade. But this idea does not just apply to developing markets; mobile devices are already important platforms for commerce in developed economies and there is no reason to doubt that the growth of mobile commerce will not continue apace everywhere. Indeed the ability to reduce transaction costs to a point where you can easily and profitably transact micropayments, then you have the basis upon which to compete for any business.
Following which JP took me literally and left a bank to join a telco! 
Well now ‘mobile’ is all the rage with the VCs and Twitter is the society phenomenon of the (mainly) West Coast digerati, so is Nate correct in mapping out payments as the silver bullet to convert tweets into dollars?
I’m not entirely convinced. Or more specifically, I think the $64k question is exactly how and where Twitter might position itself in this process. However, Nate’s thesis did get me thinking about how Twitter might go from a passionate but relatively small group of ‘early-adopters’ to a more lucrative long-term future out in the ‘real’ world. And it would seem to me that one path the management of Twitter should explore is licensing their service to corporates and other communities who might want to host such a service within a prescribed universe (for commercial and/or regulatory reasons.) This clearly could include banks and other payment providers. It could be sold as SaaS, hosted or as an appliance (installed behind the firewall for instance.) I have a few ideas as to examples of where this approach might make sense but will demur sharing these for the moment.
What do you think?
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:16 am
I think you’re supposed to be on vacation….
Other than that, I think the problem boils down to the entry and exit points of cash.
The employer pays ‘you’ into a bank account. From there one makes a variety of singular (i.e. cable tv) or aggregated (i.e. cards) account payments.
Cellphones have the real potential of being a worthwhile aggregated payment, not because I get a bill every month, but because the execution device is in my hands for several hours per day, and in easy reach if needed.
Twitter is an app on the device. The Kwickie Mart guy isnt going to ask for my twitter account, you will either swipe the phone, or give him your phone number. In this case the device IS the app. easier.
My 2 cents, but then you knew that.
Tres
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:17 pm
First rule of entrepreneurship - you are never on holiday. Just out of the office…
Thanks Tres, I tend to agree with you (this is more or less the gist of why I ‘disagreed’ with Nate but was too lazy to write.)
The value I found in Nate’s example was that it ‘flipped the switch’ in my mind as to the fact that (something like) Twitter is a service that you make money ‘because of’ and not ‘with’… ie the winning business model for a company / product like Twitter is to graft their ubiquity and viral stickiness onto a more mundane but valuable service that is probably somewhat commoditized and/or undifferentiated.
It’s slighly more complicated than what I’ve described above but I’ve got real work to do so - if I’m not making sense, that will have to wait for another day!