Twitter – Another Facebook Phenomenon?

By Paul on February 23rd, 2009

: Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

I wrote sometime back on “Do you Twitter and Why You Should“. Twitter is a growing phenomeon and its reach is extending into Asia from th West.

Singapore Business Times (actuallu Bloomberg) reported on 16Feb that it is attracting millions of dollars in capital funding. Now does that sound like Facebook? Probably not in the far future, Twitter will be catching the eye of large corporations for takeover and valuated at disgusting amounts of money. The billions range. Well, time will tell.

Here’s the article quoted from Business Times.

(SAN FRANCISCO) Twitter Inc, the Web-messaging service used by everyone from Barack Obama to Britney Spears, raised US$35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital, gaining funding to expand products.

Benchmark general partner Peter Fenton will join the board, San Francisco-based Twitter said on Friday in a blog posting. Twitter had earlier raised US$22 million, bringing the total so far to more than US$50 million.

Twitter has more than 55 million daily users who post short updates on anything from their latest date to their views on Congressional hearings. The service has emerged as a valuable source of information and news, which users can access from mobile devices or personal computers, said Todd Chaffee, general partner at Institutional Investors.

‘This is going to be a very large media property,’ Mr Chaffee said in a telephone interview. ‘Any time you have millions of users engaging with your service multiple times a day, there are a lot of monetisation opportunities.’

The company, founded in 2006 by chief executive officer Evan Williams with partners Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, rejected an offer to sell itself to Facebook Inc last year, Mr Chaffee said. The investors plan to make it an independent media company, he said.

Twitter stands apart from other technology startups because of ‘the fundamentally new mode of communication it enables’, Mr Fenton said in an e-mail.

Benchmark invested US$21 million in Twitter, while Institutional Investors contributed US$14 million, Mr Chaffee said. Benchmark spokeswoman Stephanie Gnibus declined to comment on Twitter’s valuation after the funding. – Bloomberg

Passive Income for Life