Twitter Worthless In A Year?

Don Reisinger @ The Digital Home wrote this morning about how Twitter could be worth nothing in a year, contradicting a post over at Silicon Alley Insider stating that Twitter could be worth “a billion dollars” in a year. Personally, I would side with Don on this one. I do not think that Twitter will be worth anywhere close to a billion dollars in a year, for all of the reasons that Don does and some others.

The first of which is they need to figure out a way monetize the service. They do not have ads, they do not charge for the service, but they keep taking in funding. Even Pownce has a model for monetizing their service, albeit a weak one right now, but they do.

The second of which is microblogging services like Twitter, Friendfeed, and Jaiku keep popping up soon people will demand interoperability so that they do not have to keep signing up for new services when their friends move on to a new service. Which means that Twitter’s pool of potential customers is going to eventually level-off. Don’t believe me? Look at what has happened to Instant Messagi

ng, they are all virtually interoperable and how often do you hear of friends switching IM services.

Third is the next big thing. Twitter is the hot new technology right now, but it will go the way of the Boy Band and the other one-hit-wonders that the music industry keeps churning out. How long do you think it will be before someone else comes out with a new technology that will grab everyone’s attention? It could even be one that is built on or incorporates Twitter’s terrible business model, much like Facebook did when it caused an exodus from MySpace.

Maybe Twitter should start charging all of the PR people that are using it to promote stories about their clients? Maybe that would give them a business model? If not, at least I could stop hearing about it from the PR people at my company.