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."

Comments

Yay...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Twitter... I just don't get it

[dskoll]

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.

Re:Twitter... I just don't get it

[Facegarden]

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.

Maybe you are too old. I use Twitter to see what my friends are doing. The old people will say "bah, well I *call* my friends and talk to them, grumble grumble", but I can't call everyone all the time. I have friends that I don't talk to that often, because we run in different circles, but that doesn't mean I don't care about them. If they got a new job or they're having fun on a vacation, I'm happy to know, just the same as if I bumped into them at a party and they told me. It's not highly meaningful discourse, but it's not different from a lot of the interactions we have with people on a daily basis. Only I don't have to live across the street from them to bump into them.

Specifically, I live in Silicon Valley near San Jose, and I have a lot of friends who live in San Francisco. I'm busy, and I work crazy hours, so its nice to just get an idea for what they're up to. Or sometimes they'll share a funny link, and that amuses me. I use twitter on my Android phone, so it's best for idle time - waiting for a computer to reboot, waiting for the microwave, waiting for Starbucks to finish my drink. Just times where I have a few minutes, and I'd otherwise just stare off somewhere. At Starbucks, actually, I normally try to chat with people so as to not be antisocial, but sometimes there's no one to chat with. So I check twitter and find out what my friends are doing.

And often they're talking about plans they have to go to a party, or go to a concert or some cool event, and then I give them a call and might go myself an meet up with them. So I get to go to a party with a friend that I may not have realized was happening, just because of twitter.

So plenty of people don't get twitter, but I'm a real person who gets real use out of it. I may not have explained it perfectly, but all I can say is that it fits in with my lifestyle. I'm a 26 year old techie, your lifestyle may vary and twitter may be useless to you.

But more so than anything, I find it funny how people always feel the need to let people know that they don't understand twitter.
-taylor