Marc's Voice

Twitter is now worth like half as much as it was last week

Fred Wilson has a revisionist outlook on Facebook opening up their feeds, mainly to protect his investment in Twitter.  I agree that AIM started all this, but it should be noted that Twitter just finished negotiating to be purchased by Facebook - so one has to ask yourself “why didn’t the deal go down?”

A pessimistic outlook might say that Facebook danced around with purchasing Twitter to:

- a) suck their brains and see if there’s any business model there (I guess not)

- b) floated their world view and plans past Mr. Williams and Mr. Stone to watch their faces when they reacted to the news that Facebook would be opening up their feeds (I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the shit hit the fan this week)

- c) look at the technology and see how they’re currently scaling Twitter (which seems to have been stabilized)

But I’m an optimiist and I really don’t care about whether Fred Wilson makes any more money (or for that matter Evan Williams.)

What I care about is the open web.

I care about connecting these kind of services together.  Twitter enables 3rd party developers, but insists on having a single vendor approach.  I much more prefer the approach that Identi.ca is taking.  Meanwhile FriendFeed is pushing the envelope but they’re ALSO a lock-in single vendor approach.

What we saw last week is the king of new age lock-in - Facebook - continue to innovate and take incremental steps towards open, on their own terms.  I have been harranging them over the past year or so (privatey and publicly) and I was assured that - over time - they would come to us “on their terms.”  And sure enough - they’ve stuck to their word!

Facebook Connect extends their notion of privacy into the open web.  Dynamic privacy solves many issues that have worried users, government and business about our open web.  Facebook’s experiments in targeted marketing will eventually grow into a game changing, personalized monetization model.  Just give them time.

And their public support of OpenID is being backed up with the REAL work of figuring out solutions to our UX conundrum.  ALL of this is proof that Facebook is the real dal.

Meanwhile I still haven’t seen any business models coming out of Twitter.  But what I DO know is:

- Facebook is continuing to open up further, while we’re still waiting for Track to return to Twitter - and for some evidence of a business model

- Facebook shipped Facebook Connect, and has not provided access to their feeds, and APIs for uploading videos and sharing links - all game changers

- Facebook has joined the OpenID Foundation

- they’re continuing to press the innovation envelope further - which keeps MySpace honest and on their toes

All of that is a good thing.

Dare Obasanjo pragmatic analysis of the new code has already found a limitation - so we’re not done yet. But he notes that Facebook in fact will not get hurt at all by supporting OpenID.

So big shoutout of thanks to Zuckerberg on down on doing the right thing!  Especially to Dave Morin and Josh Elman.

How Microsoft fits into all this and Facebook’s ultimate competitor (for smart targeted ads) Google - will be seen.

But one things for sure.

Whatever Twitter was worth last week is less than it is this week. Maybe not half, but certainly substantially less.