Twitter – Growing Pains Continue?

Twitter reminds me of my son – he’s growing like crazy, but up at night with painful growing pains.

Just this morning at my local coffee shop I open up my newspaper to read all about how Twitter is barely able to keep up with the growing demand on it’s Web 2.0 social networking platform let alone add new features and innovate to keep its growing userbase happy.

Even as Twitter’s users have jumped to an estimated 32.1 million from 1.6 million a year ago, the San Francisco company has just 45 employees, up from around 21 in January, and it has brought on only a handful of people with sales or business experience.

Right now Twitter is living on investment capital to the tune of over $50Million raised over two rounds of financing — and a recent valuation had it well over $200M which means that if they decided to sell today they would likely sell for at least $1Billion. 

Not bad – on paper.  In the meantime they have to deal with the opposite end of the spectrum where growth is progressing geometrically. 

Which brings me to the other article I read when I logged into my PC this morning – that Twitter is about to enter the world of TV, which is bound to give it yet another push into the mainstream culture and give it another shot of momentum — they will no doubt bend, but will they break? 

While growth is a nice challenge to have,  in these days of short attention span, massive competition and extremely low loyalty to brand rates – if Twitter isn’t able to constantly feed the short attention span of its users, keep them happy and coming back, then they will disappear just as quickly as they have grown. 

I believe this is unlikely to happen, and like the fact they have not moved too fast in changing the site away from what has made it successful – meaning they haven’t been too quick to jump into monetization strategies even though everyone knows it is inevitable. 

In any case, it will be entertaining to see how they handle the massive publicity and growth that becoming a household name is bringing…how much sleep do you think those 45 odd employees are getting these days? 

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