The inherent problem with Twitter is a) its user base is growing faster than they can really sustain it and b) without some base level of advertising, the whole thing could collapse quickly.

Combine those two realities that Facebook and Twitter are looking at separately and together it’d be like 2 people hopping in a 1-man boat that’s being pulled under by the tide.

Both companies need to find a way to monetize without breaking the bond of clean, useful functionality to their user bases.

Twitter the friendly little bird wants to become a closed source monopoly. Twitter wants to lock you and your content into their closed silo and they want to generate millions in revenue off of your content, and for this they will give you nothing back to you or your community in return.

With an Open Source solution you at least have a copy of the application that you have given value. With Open Source you have a choice. If you want to do things differently you are “Free” to take the software and do so. This kind of Freedom also keeps any ideas of vendor/data/content lock in out of the picture.

At adelph.us we believe in members freedom to control their accounts, and their content. We also believe that any revenue model should always put the members in the equation first. We believe in the Open Source community and ideals. We know we are not the smartest guys in the room and trust the our community of members and developers.

Break the chains of the old web 2.0 model. Do not give your content or your software development work to closed source old world companies they only seek to profit from your actions, and that give nothing back to you or to your communities.

I simply think it is incredibly silly that a company with no real scalable revenue model, burning cash at breakneck speed, is going around acting like it can buy up other companies, especially in these economic times. We all need some of what Facebook execs are smoking :) it will help us get through tough days with a sense of delusional hubris.

Twitter is growing, it’s creating new ways of information dissemination. The tweets during the presidential election and the recent mumbai terror events have sort of proven that. While there is a lot of potential here, twitter still needs to work on how it can reduce the noise and be a meaningful service and make money. By staying independent, their cognitive freedoms are maintained. If on the other they went the FB route, then their creative thinking would have been squashed by the product roadmap requirements of the Bergs (Mark and Sheryl).

I think @ev did the right thing by rejecting FB’s offer at this time. If twitter can ride out this eco-storm, then any option they get after it will probably be better or equivalent to the passed FB offer. The possibility of a FB IPO in 09/10 are remote given the current state of the economy.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21458486/

But ignoring that, using the Google IPO benchmark and assuming FB hits its numbers for 2008, FB should be worth about $2.3Bn. 3% of that is only ~$70Mm.

But the reality is that if Facebook uses an internal benchmark of $5Bn valuation counting the MSFT investment as an outlier, then they offered Evan & co. 10% of their company, not 3%. Simple math there.

This is exactly what I have been saying since this emerged. I think you nailed it.

Hearing people yell that “they should have sold”, “they’re crazy”, is so foolish.

I believe a day will come, in which the true value of Facebook’s offer, (in volatile equity), will look paltry compared to Twitter’s value. And it will take no longer than the solidification of Facebook’s actual value.

Ed @NextInstinct