Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Twitter Gets Major Funding, Adds New Data Center

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the power-up dept.

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."

28 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Yay... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Yay... by Stregano · · Score: 4, Funny

      There must be like a million better uses for it

      coke and hookers?

      --
      The world is how you make it
    2. Re:Yay... by entotre · · Score: 2

      True, but because twitter is driven by marketing, i like better comparing it to Second Life

    3. Re:Yay... by matazar · · Score: 2

      My question is how many of those 100 million accounts post more than 1 message before they become forgotten. How many last more than a week....

    4. Re:Yay... by dummondwhu · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, it surely makes no sense to grow as much as possible when the opportunity presents itself because it's going to all come undone at some point. We might as well hide under our beds instead of going to work. Hell, I know the work I'm doing now is going to be a useless piece of shit in a decade, so why bother?

    5. Re:Yay... by igreaterthanu · · Score: 2

      Also in 5 years the value of the equipment in said data center will have dropped substantially.

      The land, if they own it, can be sold easily.

      So why does this matter again?

      --
      I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
    6. Re:Yay... by Locke2005 · · Score: 2

      'cause obviously once you build a data center optimized for Twitter, it can't possibly be used for anything else... hey, maybe somebody should invent a general purpose computer, instead of these damn servers that can only host one application!

      --
      I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    7. Re:Yay... by AbRASiON · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How did this get +3 on the moderation? I'm going to guess twitter haters?
      Not all huge sites are shrinking in size, look at facebook, youtube, google themselves.

      Twitter is one of the greatest new forms of communications in the last 20 years.
      My first 2 tweets stayed for 6+ months iirc and were just "twitter is lame" and "update: twitter is still a wank" or something like that.
      I didn't 'get' twitter.

      Now that I do, I do not understand why on earth SMS still exists, this website / application(s) allows me to talk to people instantly across the planet with a 0$ fee (unlike SMS) and I can include pictures, links or whatever, I can use trending topics to see what is big in the world right this second! (yes, that's big)
      When someone posts "is that an earthquake?!" I go to twitter, type in earthquake and can have confirmation in seconds

      Twitter allows manufacturers, famous people and important people to instantly share messages and thoughts with people. There is an awful awful lot of stupid and irrelivant shit, mark my words I understand this but inbetween all that it's amazing, utterly amazing.

      I can see my friends have conversations - and yes they can do it privately but they can also do it publically, that ability to see their conversation - is almost like being at a resteraunt or bar where everyone is having a chat - my ears are tuning in (if I desire) to their conversation and I can at any moment join in, all wirelessly, all instantly - in any timezone.

      I don't often praise things and it sure as shit took me a while to get it, infact until you literally have an account and follow a couple of people, I totally get hating on it - the interface is silly to understand at first, once you do get it - it's incredible, utterly incredible.

      My only problem with twitter, or rather their only problem is that I simply can not fathom how they can monetize it - in any way. Google however purchased Youtube and I distinctly recall me saying "what the fuck is google thinking? 4 billion? That's stupid - this is googles first big mistake" - I mean there was no ads back then and it was 5 years ago, bandwidth is fucking expensive and they just paid money to serve up terabytes of data a day, why?!
      Anyhow: TLDR is that twitter should utterly replace SMS, without question, 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.

    8. Re:Yay... by icebraining · · Score: 2

      That measurement is flawed. 70% of tweets are not replied to. You can't possibly know if they're being ignored or not.

      I don't have a Twitter account, but I've used its search to check what people are saying about $subject. Of course I won't reply, but I'm still interested in reading them.

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
    9. Re:Yay... by John+Betonschaar · · Score: 2

      Twitter is one of the greatest new forms of communications in the last 20 years.

      I stopped reading after that comment, you must be completely out of your mind if you really thing blasting out 140-character blurbs that are only indexable/searchable by stupid free-form hashtags to random sets of people who are 'following' you constitutes 'one of the greatest forms of communications over the last 20 years'. Twitter is not about communication, at least not two-way communication, it's broadcasting, and a very limited and in most cases useless implementation of it. As soon as you try following over 10 people or want to know stuff about some hashtag, the big mess of unrelated, unconnected, context-less crap you get everytime you hit refresh all but blocks out the tiny bits of useful information you sometimes find in some peoples' tweets. Or do you only send private tweets, in which case you're simply using Twitter as an alternative to SMS text-messages.

      Twitter has only one use, which is as a broadcast mechanism for people who actually have something interesting to say (less than 1% of people I guess), and it's a pretty poor implementation of it because the 1% useful stuff gets drowned in the 99% of useless crap. For actual communication with people you know something like Facebook is a million times better because it provides message history, context, a network of connections instead of just 'followers' and 'following', etc. For communicating with people you don't know (yet) you might as well just use an e-mail. For broadcasting interesting stuff you'd first have to have interesting stuff in the first place, which doesn't hold for the vast majority of stuff. If you're a rock star or a politician running for president, a Twitter account is great, because you can pretend caring about keeping your fans 'up-to-date' by having an associate make up some tweets every now and then. If you really have something interesting to say and use twitter functionally: yes, Twitter is the 'greatest form of communications of the last 20 years', for you and the rest of the 0.1% of people who fall in the same category.

      My first experiences with twitter were just like yours, then I thought 'I got it' and changed my mind, and I thought twitter was great so I started following people. Then I found out how useless it is because tweets have no context, and I'd be wading through worthless tweets (even the ones from interesting people) just to find out why the fuck they were (re-)tweeting someone. Finally I gave up with the conclusion that Twitter is a useless hyped-up fad for about everything. You give a whole list of examples of how great twitter is for this and that, but litteraly none of these are not better served by other communication channels. Communicating with friends? Use a social networking site. Communicating with and updating customers? Use your freaking corporate website. Sending pictures and links? Every common communication method right now has that (Facebook, website, blog, e-mail). The stupid 'I can find out everything about the earthquake' example I see people mention so often? Before you'd know there even was an earthquake somewhere, news sites all over the world would be reporting on it already, or do you randomly search for #earthquake all day? And even if you'd find out before some topic hits news sites, what kind of actual useful information can you filter out by looking at 10,000 tweets saying "OMG THERE'S AN EARTHQUAKE HERE #earthquake"?

      Really, twitter will go down by it's own success, the whole idea of people sharing everything is stupid, because it will inevitably lead to an overload of irrelevant or useless information, drowning the useful bits. There's a reason we have journalists, editors, reporters, newspapers, news channels and 50 different ways of private communication, and the reason is to filter out useless information, because our minds have limited capacity. Twitter is in no way 'the greatest form of communication in 20 years'. It's just 'a way' of 'some form of communication' that is 'great in a few situations' but 'useless in most'.

    10. Re:Yay... by bint · · Score: 2

      "[...] Read the rest of this comment..."

      I kind of understand why you don't like twitter ;)

  2. One question that we all want to know by santax · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now, when they get that second server, will we be able to at least get 255 chars in a tweet?

    1. Re:One question that we all want to know by tux0r · · Score: 2

      It's not the technology upgrades which will engender longer tweets, it's profitability.

      When the new subscription rate slows and Twitter decides that promotion/advertising revenue isn't enough, I expect the ability to tweet longer will be a "premium" (paid) enhancement. 140 char tweets stay free, but if you load up your account with Twitter credits ("Twedits"?), every block of 70 extra chars costs you x twedits...

      --
      ( Redundancy is ) ^ n
    2. Re:One question that we all want to know by The+Archon+V2.0 · · Score: 2

      No, but 10,000 more fake Puff Daddy twitter accounts will appear in its place

      Hey, now. Don't be mad at P. Diddy. It took so long for Puff to register alternate names that some people got them before Diddy did. Puffy's doing his best, and I'm sure Sean will get the last of them before his next name change.

  3. Another fine investment decision... by Denny · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are Twitter at any point going to get a revenue stream?

    --
    Police State UK - news and
    1. Re:Another fine investment decision... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      This is a popular response, but they've been profitable since they began the Google/Bing search deals last November/December. It looks like this round is to catalyse and sustain growth.

    2. Re:Another fine investment decision... by omnibit · · Score: 2

      Are Twitter at any point going to get a revenue stream?

      Yes. They're now selling promoted tweets for up to $100,000. Engagement rates were significantly higher than what was seen on Google's sponsored links, though that's likely due to its novelty. With enough promoted tweets however, you could start to see some serious cash rolling in.

    3. Re:Another fine investment decision... by rochocinco · · Score: 3, Informative

      Where are you getting that info? There were a lot of reports end of last year about them being profitable. But, in August of this year, they admitted they are not profitable. There is an interview on CNN Money.

  4. The funding was delivered in the form... by forkfail · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... of 1,428,571 $1.40 checks, so it'll take a while before they can actually use it...

    --
    Check your premises.
  5. Says something about the state of things by thewils · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:Says something about the state of things by Bryan3000000 · · Score: 2

      But biofuel research has no immediate profitability or practical necessity (since we have oil), while Twitter is a highly, um, used, uh, and even my refrigerator can use twitter if I, uh, and there's a lot of profit just waiting to be, uh, figured out how to, um, be made somehow [yeah, we're screwed]

  6. Twitter... I just don't get it by dskoll · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Twitter... I just don't get it by shish · · Score: 2

      It's IRC, badly re-implemented over port 80; the only real improvement is global stats, so you can see which chan^H^H^H^Hhashtags are most active at any time

      --
      I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
    2. Re:Twitter... I just don't get it by Facegarden · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

      --
      Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
    3. Re:Twitter... I just don't get it by NiceGeek · · Score: 2

      It's not age that is a factor, it's the unwillingness to adapt to new things. I'm 43, I remember fondly things like my Commodore 64, my Atari 2600, and 70s 80s music, but I refuse to be stuck there.
      Times change, you either change with them or you get left behind. I find Twitter an interesting and useful way of keeping up with my friends, some of whom are thousands of miles away. We've even used Twitter to co-ordinate a get together of some folks from across the US.

  7. Datacenters in hightaxland? I don't get it. by otis+wildflower · · Score: 2

    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..

  8. Cash burn rate? by drolli · · Score: 2

    Can anybody explain the long-term business model of twitter?

  9. SMS vs Twitter by bayankaran · · Score: 2

    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