At the start of this year, Seesmic bought Ping.fm enabling status updates across 50 social networks. Mark Hopkins elaborated on why this is a threat to Twitter.
Scobleizer talks about Twitter’s declining traffic and offers suggestions for improvement, which people commenting on the post say would turn Twitter into FriendFeed/Facebook.
Seesmic’s Ping.fm acquisition had led me to wonder if that makes it a perfect candidate for a Twitter acquisition. Marshall Kirkpatrick seemed to agree.
Would it make sense for Twitter to acquire Seesmic and Ping.fm?
Does Twitter want to build its own social network and fight against Facebook? Contrary to what you might think, Evan Williams says Twitter is not a social network.
Twitter’s strategy is to be the “Pulse of the Planet”. What better way to become that pulse than be the conduit that people use across 50 social networks? This would bolster Jack Dorsey’s vision of Twitter’s success as Twitter becoming infrastructure.
When the goal of a service is to become the nervous system of the real-time web, the traffic to its website doesn’t matter. The pulse of the online world lies in status updates people make on various social networks. I am sure that Seesmic, with Ping.fm’s half a million users, looks a very attractive option for Twitter to grab that pulse.
The scenario can look gloomy for the open web, with the social graph of users in the hands of Facebook, and real-time pulse in the hands of Twitter.
