There are so many things about Twitter that I wonder about. I see people like Scoble raving about it, saying that they are spending more time talking on Twitter than they do anywhere else.

Seriously? For that use case, Twitter is basically a half baked IM client. If you want a real conversation, an IRC channel works a lot better. I seriously don't get that use of Twitter, because it's about as sub-optimal a tool for that as I can imagine.

Then there's the revenue model. I really don't get that. I see people (like Jason Calacanis) saying that it's not relevant, but that's only true if a large company is willing to buy Twitter. Who might that be? Yahoo? You mean, while they're busy fending off MS? Microsoft? They look like they'll be busy with the Yahoo fight for awhile. Google? What would they want with a resource sink that generates no money?

At the end of the day, traffic isn't everything (or even anything) - unless you can translate that to dollars. There are tons of Twitter clients, using the open API - some of them even show ads. Does any of that money go back to Twitter? I see no reason it should; you don't need help from Twitter to create a client. I've written code to their API, and I could wake the Swallow client back up and write more, if I had any motivation.

To be honest, I have the same questions about a lot of the streaming video businesses out there. I still think the ad business - as used in video and audio, anyway - is mostly a shared fiction. The advertisers pretend to believe there's value in it, and the sellers keep taking the revenue. At the first sign of a real economic slow down, I expect a ton of the ad supported companies that have popped up to drop like flies. Along with them, I expect a lot of the "revenue? what's that?" companies like Twitter to die off, too.

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