The tweets that no one reads
Could m2m twitter be the next big trend? And is that good or bad for their IPO?
m2m communications — where computers speak to other computers without any human involvement — is a current growth channel for telcos over the world. Security systems and banking systems often send messages to each other to coordinate: messages that no other human will ever see.
Twitter has not escaped this trend. In the past year, we’ve seen a proliferation of devices and apps that tweet on your behalf. Even your fridge can tweet your grocer when the milk is running low.
There are many levels of this. On a simple level, we’ve probably all enabled auto-tweets at some point — whether it is automatically sending your Facebook status updates to your Twitter account, promoting your Tumblr posts on Twitter or uploading your latest exercise accomplishment on Runkeeper. This gets more ridiculous when you throw Twitterbots into the mix — semi-automated tweets issued on behalf of companies or public figures (do you really think Miley Cyrus sits on her iPhone replying to her tweets? She’s way too busy twerking). Fully automated tweeting takes this up another notch — automated computers that tweet to humans (even Obama has been criticized for this dubious campaign strategy…).
What’s next? Computers tweeting exclusively to other computers? It makes sense. Twitter has built a robust, real-time short message transmission system that is achingly simple to implement, bypasses pretty much every corporate firewall, has few interoperability issues between operating systems / hardware platforms and utilizes an API that is unlikely to fundamentally change.
So why should you care if your fridge is now going to start tweeting your neighbor’s fridge when it needs to borrow some cheese? Here’s why. In their IPO filing, Twitter revealed they have 218M ‘active users’ — users who actively tweet. But Twitter refuse to split this between human tweeters and computer tweeters. Probably because Twitter doesn’t really know the answer.
If it is mostly computers using Twitter rather than humans, you know what computers don’t do? Read adverts. Which throws Twitter’s entire monetization model, business plan and valuation into tailspin.
As much as I love and admire Twitter, this is an IPO that I’m not taking a punt on.
