The #140conf ended yesterday. In many ways, it was an historical moment.
Most of the Twitter Lords (as Andrew Keen @ajkeen named people with over 500,000 followers on Twitter) and the Social Media gurus would meet for the first time. Time was about connecting and building relationships as they say.
As mentioned in previous posts, that community is surprisingly human and warm. People talk and laugh with speakers as they speak. People share a strong need for being part of a group/community. People want to hear stories and see you opening up your vulnerable zones. The traditional hand shake is replaced here by a warm and deep felt hug. Now you think you can imagine, but really this is a conference of people who have never met in real life before. Only on Twitter.
Nothing happens with no reasons. How come a technology conference is more about making friends and not about doing business?
Fred Wilson, probably the hottest tech VC of the moment and first investor in Twitter, gave a very interesting speech. He nailed down what seems to me fundamental: Twitter doesn't have a business model yet!
That changes all the rules and the way to connect on Twitter. That defines who, how and why people attend the Twitter conference and use the platform. Now it's about making friends. Tomorrow making money.
Fred Wilson has been honest and direct with the crowd:
Then he put down the fundamentals of what we will see for the next 5 years:
"It's all about links.
"Google took 2 years to figure out AdSense and start to make money. But Google now can bring to websites humongous traffic. And companies pay for it.
"These days we see Facebook and Twitter bringing traffic to websites through people referred links. The sites that we monitor at the moment have 5 times more traffic coming from Google than Facebook and Twitter all together.
"But Google seem to increase it's traffic links every month by about 1%. Facebook and Twitter are increasing their referred links at a fast pace. Based on what we see we can predict that in one year, Facebook and Twitter combined will bring more traffic to websites that Google."
Fred Wilson is kind and professional by preparing us: Soon Facebook and Twitter will try to make money out of these referred links.
Money will then invade social media and will attract new kind of people within the community. Making real friends might not remain the priority. Being goofy and shooting funny things might happen less and less during conferences.
When there is no challenge, people play nicely. Put a carrot in the middle of the crowd and the play starts to get rough. That is human nature and a new technology won't change that.
At this moment, the Twitter community is beautiful. The day Fred Wilson and the Board will set new rules, the game will change. So hopefully, they'll think of preserving the quality of people and the nice friendships that are being developed within Twitter.
Next time you meet Fred, please hug him. He'll feel it. He'll remember it. He'll have it fresh in mind at the moment of decision of putting new rules.
Thanks a lot Bastien for this very useful feedback on the #140conf...It seems like this conference was different than the others, ...cause Twitter is different than the others also.
Keep on feeding us Bastien.
Nicolas
Posted by: Nicolas Lefebvre | 06/19/2009 at 12:52 PM
This was precisely the answers I’d been searching for. Amazing blog. Incredibly inspirational!
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