There’s a lot of coverage of the new funding Twitter has received – despite not actively looking for more money.
For a sample of the coverage:
Venturebeat. Techcrunch. Mashable. ReadWriteWeb. Fred Wilson. Wired. Twitterati. Techcrunch again. Oh, and the official Twitter blog.
And those are just the some of the sources in my RSS feed! What echo chamber?
But does it affect anything?
Mark at Twitterati suggests Twitter could now fund its 20 employees at $100,000 a year for the next 15 years with current funding – that’s a healthy window!
Plus there are the options to fund new services, buy existing external services etc.
But the biggest implication may be that the team behind Twitter are unlikely to ever sell – after turning down an offer from Facebook, and Ev’s sale of Blogger to Google, I get the feeling this one is a keeper – perhaps showing a move from the almost traditional start-up route of planning around an exit strategy.
And with discussion around real time information perhaps becoming a threat to Google, it’s entirely possible the Twitter team might be aiming to evolve into a longterm internet property (playing with Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Facebook etc).
I’m really interested to see what comments and suggestions come out of this for possible innovation and acquisition – should Twitter buy Tweetdeck for example? Will this fund radical new services? Or is this just additional breathing space before the problems of monetisation might kick in?
Most importantly – is this more evidence to back up Ev’s statement that the current access and functionality of Twitter can remain free?