Microsoft

I took the passage below from one of The Economist’s latest stories on social networking. I tend to agree with the assessment of Twitter as an “information company,” the more I see its evolution.

“..Mr Stone says he sees Twitter as more akin to an outfit like Google than to Facebook. He describes the business as “an information company” whose users are keen to find out answers to what is happening in the world. The billions of tweets that Twitter is gathering up could certainly be the basis for a vast, searchable archive. The challenge facing Mr Stone and his colleagues is to find smart ways of transforming those raw data into profits."

But if you look at how the platform is being used and monetized, it’s exactly as Stone describes in the passage above. Both Google and Microsoft have compensated Twitter for its “information” and that interest doesn’t appear to be waning soon.

Both Bing and Google realized early on that real-time would have a big impact on the way people search for information. While they’ve got their own share of eyeballs, the reality is that you and I continue to communicate on an always-on and instantaneous channel as we share on Twitter’s platform.

None of the others — Google. Microsoft, or Yahoo — have anything to rival that. Of course Facebook is the closest. as The Economist points out, but still lacks the openness that Twitter provides. Until Facebook or another entrant opens to the web completely – a la Twitter – its information will remain at a premium.