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Twitter Gets Major Funding, Adds New Data Center
1sockchuck writes "Twitter has announced new funding led by Kleiner Perkins, with reports placing the new round at $200 million for a valuation of $3.7 billion. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the microblogging service added more than 100 million new accounts in the past 12 months. That kind of growth requires a lot of servers, so Twitter will open a new data center in Sacramento as it begins to operate its own facilities, following a path forged by Google and Facebook."
Another company blows all their money on a data center...
In 5 years, the newest fad will arrive, and Twitter will be out of business, or suffer extreme drops in revenue and users.
Don't believe me? How's MySpace these days? Or Gawker? Or one of the other dot-coms that went under after their popularity waned.
Now, when they get that second server, will we be able to at least get 255 chars in a tweet?
Are Twitter at any point going to get a revenue stream?
Police State UK - news and
... of 1,428,571 $1.40 checks, so it'll take a while before they can actually use it...
Check your premises.
I'm still blown away that a company such a simple idea, run on such a simple site, requires a CEO.
He's like the CEO of txt messages.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Consecutive articles on /. $30M for biofuel research, $200M for twitter. We're fucked, but at least we can tweet about it.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Will the abundant solar offset the enormous cooling requirements during the Summer months?
Do they hope to be involved with CA government somehow?
I'm not knocking the choice. You're close enough to the BA to stil have some connection, and housing in the area is very affordable for the time being. You shouldn't have any trouble finding educated people to work there.
I'm just curious what the rationale was for that location.
With a 140 character constraint.
Yours In Miami,
K. Trout, C.I.O.
Somewhere between twat and shitter
Simple concept yes, but simple to scale? no, simple to manage adding new features? no simple to manage adding 100M new accounts a year?, no Simple to do way over 50 million tweets a day? no In January of this year they were doing 50M tweets a day, but they have added 100M users since then. Just think of how many they are doing now, so yes they need a CEO http://blog.twitter.com/2010/02/measuring-tweets.html Plus they have to figure out how to make money on all of this.
#===> #===> #===>
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Twitter servers in Sacramento? One more reason to hope California falls into the ocean.
Maybe I'm too old (hey... get off my lawn! Sorry...) but I just don't get the appeal of Twitter. Billions of tweets per day of which maybe 7 aren't banal. Never mind the business model, I just don't get anything about Twitter.
How many tweets per day are mindless Retweets? How many accounts tweet more than once a day? Twitter is not a killer app for the web, it's a highly limited service that allows you to post 144 characters online, with no built in image uploading. How can anyone think twitter is worth pouring money into?
Having all the stupidest people on one sight makes them relatively easy to filter away.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What's Twitters business model again? Sure, lots of people are babbling on it, but what's their plan for monetizing the babbling? Or do they plan on pulling an AOL and trading their massively overinflated stock for stock in a company that actually has tangible assets?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How many Twitter accounts *are* there? How many unique (in the scientific, not cultural way) individuals actually use twitter? What percentage of that 100 million and then the entire population are actually just marketing accounts?
"Hey guys! All the impressionable consumers with disposable income are over here now!!!"
*five minutes later*
"@JackNormalGuy "Yo dawg dez nue kix are sweet! U shood check there syt, srslyLOL!! bit.ly/4Tju7"
2) PROFIT!!!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
As someone has already stated, Twitter has been running at a profit for quite some time.
Seriously, between taxes, power costs, employee costs, etc.. Why build datacenters in hightaxland? I figure NV, WA, TX, FL would be better for datacenters, and ideally WY or SD if there's adequate fiber available (and ya gotta wonder, given the military presence especially in western SD)..
Local costs of living are low, utilites and taxes are low, real-estate costs are low.. Do everything remotely and have local monkeys do hands-on if you can't reach remote KVM or serial/ILO, and fly folks out for the occasional builds..
Can anybody explain the long-term business model of twitter?
It's possible i suppose, but 100 million legitimate accounts sounds a bit dubious... Probably 1 in 10 of people who 'follow' me are bots/spammers.
I thought the same thing. There are lots of places with enough smart people and low costs of doing business. Blacskurg, VA (well, Christiansburg - right next door - actually) is a great place. If there hadn't been a small sinkhole on the proposed site we would have gotten a $500M datacenter.
Fat internet pipes, cheap land and taxes, and a big university (VT) to pull cheap college grad (and undergrad) labor from.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Sure, you can use any communications medium to coordinate anything. That's not the point.
The point is that artificial, technological restrictions are stupid, and it's a mystery as to why people choose to submit to them.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Just like Bernie Madoff was
FL? Really? Really?
*sigh*
The only truly good location you've listed is NV - NV is one of the most disaster-proof areas of the country. Cooling doesn't come cheap, however, and given Twitter has no real form of revenue, that's going to be a factor. TX is... decent, at best.
As it were, Sacramento has some damned good pipe, which is pretty damned important.
And 99,595,000 of them were created by bots for spamming.
Only about 50k of those have been on any day following the day the account was created.
The company I work for runs a website with about 3 million registered users ... we see about 15k of them on a day to day basis, probably 2.5 million of them have never logged in after they created their account, and the rest only use it once or twice and never come back.
You can certainly say its because people aren't interested in what we offer, and you'd certainly be right, however I think you'll find our numbers probably have a ratio about the same as twitter.
People will sign up for new free shit just to try it and never come back, or they'll sign up with multiple accounts so they can reserve names or because they forgot they registered previously or have a new email address or any of a bunch of other reasons.
If twitter would work with me a little bit, we could probably create 300 million new accounts in a few days using a script ... and the script would use the website just as much as the 300 million new accounts created, that is ... none at all.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No choice? There's an entire Internet of choice. There were alternatives to Twitter before Twitter was thought of. What are you talking about?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
*Golf*YAWN*Clap*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Says the AC without a source to his name. Bugger off.
Well they have one planned for Salt Lake City, Utah which seems to be an area catering to the tech market recently. The article stated there was no response on if that location was still on schedule. The exact location for Sacramento seems unclear to me. It sounds like they may be taking advantage of readily built space.
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SMS is completely dead to me, all my friends with twitter I can tweet in seconds, it's a fucking incredibly powerful and clever communications tool, once you learn it, you'll love it.
SMS might be dead to you. And I am guessing you are in USA where a text message will cost anywhere between 5 to 20 cents. But for a majority of the world which is not you, SMS is THE form of communication other than a voice call. I pay less than one cent per SMS. And I sent SMS to any cell phone, whether it is a smart phone or not.
Twitter has its use. SMS has its place.
You remind me of someone who claimed cinema will be dead when television was introduced.
Tat Tvam Asi
Okay, lets look at this.
On one hand you have Twitter, a way of communicating with the world instantly. While it has it's uses, it's made up of the idea that what you have to post is so fucking important, that everyone needs to see it.
Facebook. the "social network" that everyone is on. Everyone has to share their photo's, info, and every fucking thing else of their lives. While there is some privacy, it seems to be very crappy. And it is also based on the idea that what you do is important enough to share with everyone (though it does have like some privacy settings).
And on the other hand, we have people complaining about the lack of privacy, how companies like google track everything you do, etc.
Be seeing you...
Why would they build a datacenter in California? Electricity is quite expensive there, which is the majority of the operational costs for a datacenter. If I had any money invested there I'd get it out.
Sig missing. Reward.