Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams
It can tell you when Ashton Kutcher is getting a haircut, what your best friend had for breakfast, and how many people have preordered the iPad. But popular social networking site Twitter can't really tell you how it plans to make money.
That was supposed to change Monday when Twitter chief executive officer Evan Williams spoke at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Tex. Mr. Williams was expected to announce an advertising plan for the site to help it secure long-term sources of revenue.
That plan didn't emerge, the much-hyped keynote speaker lost attendees who trickled out before it was over, and it's still unclear how Twitter plans to foster a sustainable business model.
What Mr. Williams did announce is a Twitter expansion called @Anywhere. It allows users to log into other websites using their Twitter accounts, so they can tweet a link to something interesting without having to actually go to the Twitter site. Those third-party sites will highlight names and businesses that use Twitter and, when the mouse scrolls over them, a window pops up showing the user's account and latest activity there.
"Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page," the blog post announcing the change said.
The service has some big-name launch partners, including Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, and YouTube.
"These big partners aren't who we want to limit it to," Mr. Williams said. The strategy is to make the service more visible, and useful, everywhere across the Internet.
But Twitter did not provide many details on how it would work, when it would be available, or whether those partners are paying to integrate Twitter features into their websites.
"The company offered a lot of promise and not a lot of product," technology analyst Carmi Levy said. "That's why it was received with a big yawn."
At the end of last year, there were reports that, thanks to deals with Google and Microsoft to make its users' postings available on search engines, Twitter was actually profitable. But because Twitter is a private company, details are slim and some observers are skeptical.
"It's all speculation," Mr. Levy said.
Augie Ray, a social media analyst with Forrester Research, said it may be a good thing Twitter did not move into the realm of advertising with its announcement yesterday.
"Twitter hasn't shown that much interest in being an ad network … they really see data as being their primary driver," he said. The more the site can build its presence on the Internet, the easier time it will have collecting data about those habits and selling it to interested companies.
But to gather that data, Twitter needs to expand, he said.