I read an article tonight from frickenate entitled ‘Twitter Would Sell Database to Highest Bidder‘. He noticed a few alarming statements within Twitter’s Privacy Policy. Including :

Twitter may sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of its assets, including your personally identifiable information, in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy. You will have the opportunity to opt out of any such transfer if the new entity’s planned processing of your information differs materially from that set forth in this Privacy Policy.

and

Twitter may sell… all of its assets, including your personally identifiable information, in connection with a… sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy.

As frickenate rightly points out, this information not only includes names and email addresses, it also includes mobile phone numbers. Twitter has still not been bought over by a large company like Google or Microsoft.

If a business model cannot be found, would the Twitter founders simply sell the site, and users information, to the highest bidder? It certainly is food for thought

Link : Twitter Would Sell Database to Highest Bidder via @frickenate

Without doubt, Twitter owes a huge amount of success to bloggers, webmasters and ‘tech friendly’ internet users who are quick to embrace new technologies (and to celebrities like Stephen Fry and Wil Wheaton). With Ashton Kutcher recently reaching 1 million followers and @Oprah approaching half a million quickly in less than a week, it’s fair to say that Twitter has arrived.

Twitter has been hitting the headlines a lot in the last 6 months but history has shown that once a service starts being embraced by superstars like Oprah, it is taken to a whole new level (We are talking about a lady with so much influence she can recommend a book and within a few weeks it will be on the top sellers list!).

I believe that Twitter is going to double it’s number of users in the next few months but I also believe a lot of the people who will be signing up are not very ‘internet literate’ i.e. people who use the internet frequently for email and web browsing but not much else. Will these people be using Twitter everday in 6 months time? Will they understand how to get the most out of it?

I am not suggesting that those who only use the internet for web browsing will not understand Twitter but perhaps they do not need to use it as much musicians, bloggers, gamers etc. So will they see it as a Fad?

Social Website Cycles

Social websites grow incredibly quick but they can also grow out of favour very quickly too. In the UK I witnessed Friends Reunited grow from nothing to a site which everyone from my high school class signed up to and it was referred to frequently when I was out at the pub at the weekend. Then, less than a year later, no ever used it. I guess everyone got bored of it i.e. the novelty wore off.

Whilst travelling America I saw MySpace grow in the same manner. Everyone I spoke to asked if I had a MySpace account and everyone seemed to be checking it daily. MySpace remains an incredibly popular site but it has certainly lost a lot of people to other social networking sites.

Around 2 years ago, Bebo was the site which everyone in the UK was using. All of a sudden people I only knew a little bit were telling me ‘they’d bebo me’ about something or other. However, in the last year that too has grown out of favour and no one seems to ever use it now.

The one everyone is currently using is FaceBook. For a few months I was checking it everyday because all of my friends (near and far) were leaving me messages and posting new pictures and tagging me. At the moment, I’ve not had to log in for a few weeks because very few of my friends seem to be using it anymore.

It’s not that FaceBook is any less useful. I just believe that is the nature of social networking sites. People catch up friends on it but after a whilte they become a little bored of it and the novelty wears off. I am sure that FaceBook will continue to get new members at a fast rate and I am sure that people will still use it a lot too, however I also believe that many of it’s current users will start to rely on it less and less.

So what has this got to do with Twitter? Well, I don’t believe Twitter can be compared directly to a social networking site because quite simply, it isn’t one, it’s a micro blogging service. However, social sites in general tend to grow quickly and decline just as quick. Will Twitter turn out to be a ‘fad’ in some peoples eyes?

Perhaps there’s a bigger chance of Twitter being replaced by a ‘Twitter Clone’ which is more reliable and has more features. There are many features that Twitter users want to see added to Twitter but so far they have not been added. If a company comes out with a good service with more functionality then it only takes a few key influential people to endorse it and it will grow rapidly.

What do you think : Do you think many people see Twitter as a fad?