There's always been jabs at Twitter for not having a viable business model and the chatter has increased in the current economic climate. In a recent interview Evan Williams, Twitter CEO, said "We had planned to focus on revenue in 2010 but that's no longer the case, so we changed the plan quite a bit... We've moved revenue higher on our list of priorities...".



I believe Twitter, potentially, has an incredible business model.



In The New York Times R&D Labs, where I work, we've been talking a lot about 'smart content', both in relation to advertising, search and news delivery. For the past 157 years (that's how old the newspaper is) we've essentially delivered 'dumb content' to people's doorsteps. You and I, irrespective of interests, location etc. have received the same newspaper on our doorsteps every morning. We're beginning to explore ways to make content smarter, to understand what you've read, which device you've read it on and you're micro level interests--making the most important news find you, instead of you having to find it.



This also changes the advertising model where ads become even smarter. Sure, ads are at about a 1st grade reading level now, with adsense and cookies the ad networks have half an idea of what I'm interested in, but they aren't exactly smart about it. Just because a friend sends me an email about a baseball game, doesn't mean I want to see ESPN ads in my Gmail.



So what does this have to do with a Twitter business model? Twitter, potentially, has the ability to deliver unbelievably smart advertising; advertising that I actually want to see, and they have the ability to deliver search results far superior and more accurate to Google, putting Twitter in the running to beat Google in the latent quest to the semantic web. With some really intelligent data mining and cross pollination, they could give me ads that makes sense not for something I looked at 3 weeks ago, or a link my wife clicked on when she borrowed my laptop, but ads that are extremely relevant to 'what I'm doing right now'.



A quick parusel of my Tweets shows that I live in Brooklyn, NY, I work for The New York Times, teach at NYU/ITP, I travel somewhere once a month for work, I love gardening, cappuccinos, my Vespa , U.I./Design and hardware hacking, I'm a political news junkie, I read Gizmodo & NYTimes.com and I was looking for a new car for a while, but now have a MINI and I'm also friends with these people. That's a treasure trove of data about me, and it's semantic on a granular level about only my interests.



If I send a tweet saying "I'm looking for a new car does anyone have any recommendations", I would be more than happy to see 'smart' user generated advertising recommendations based on my past tweets, mine the data of other people living Brooklyn who have tweeted about their car and deliver a tweet/ad based on those result leaving spammers lost in the noise. I'd also expect when I send a tweet saying 'I got a new car and love it!' that those car ads stop appearing and something else, relevant to only me, takes it's place.



And it doesn't have to be advertising delivered on their site alone. One of the great successes of Twitter has been their API's and the wonderful applications and sites that users have built with them. Why not build out an advertising or search API that delivers the latest micro level tags or ad links of users interests. There's a plethora of opportunity with this data, and if it's done right it becomes enticing and engaging, not annoying, irrelevant and outdated.

micromessaging startups are growing fast http://bit.ly/3M0Mah

New campaign for Career Builder, to find a better job. More visuals available.

Baseline : "Maybe it's time to move on".

"Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool," Eric Schmidt told an audience of magazine publishers assembled at Google yesterday. Wait, what happened to the magic Google algorithm that reverse-engineers our reputations? Does it now rank pages by brand, too? I hope so, because when I Google myself at midnight all I see is Valleywag, Valleywag, Valleywag. I'd like to believe Google knows something my agent doesn't. (Photo by AP/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

Here a bit of news from my former employer who is pursuing the 7th Mass Media space with single-minded purpose. Nokia announced the Nokia Media Network to develop mobile advertising with many big publishers and media brands like AFP, International Herald Tribune, RTL etc. Yet another example of the convergence and players who are aiming for the opportunity at the heart of it. Check out the Nokia press release for more.

Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable:
Google Shuts Down FeedBurner's Ad Network (FAN)  --  I have been a huge fan of FeedBurner, RSS feed management company, for a really long time.  Yes, before Google bought them and even before they had most of their cool features.  In any event, I noticed a Google Groups thread ...

Want to know which venture capitalist invested in which web 2.0-company? Take a look at Crunchbase. It's all there. And the best thing is: it has a beautiful and responsive API. I couldn't resist downloading a few entries from this database to visualize the network of investors and companies that's evolving around the new microblogging and lifestreaming tools.

So, here's a network map of the most important companies offering microblogging or lifestreaming services and their investors. The companies are symbolized as green circles and the funding organizations as red squares (click to enlarge). It's interesting how Ron Conway connects Seesmic, Twitter and Pownce with his investments. The rest is not exactly heavily linked by funding streams. Next will be a visualization that also shows the amount of money raised and the size of the companies.

See also these network graphs by Mikko Kivelä and Bemmu Sepponen displaying the links between companies and people of the whole Crunchbase.

Analyst firms exist for two reasons: First, to dispense words posing as wisdom, for free, to journalists, as a publicity scheme to get their name out. Second, to dispense words posing as wisdom, for large sums of money, to corporations, who have read their quotes in the press. Forrester Research is acquiring JupiterResearch, which will have the salubrious effect of reducing the wear and tear on reporters' phone keypads. And instead of two wrong predictions? Only one. We hope the antitrust authorities do not block this deal.

This is probably one of the most important things that Twitter has done in its young history. Search is not good at Twitter, but Summize is a pretty good Twitter search service. It also could be a lot more. And there are many, many more things Twitter could do.

This is also the glimmerings of a business model for Twitter, in that the service needs attachment points of declared intent which may make sense for marketing. Search is certainly one.

The favorite downtime-riddled platform for sharing the lumps life gives you in 140 characters or less, Twitter, has received a hot investment infusion of an undisclosed amount from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital. Spokesperson Biz Stone promises everyone that "Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model," though they must have been a bit more specific when pitching to Bezos and Sabet. Sabet, for his part, earned himself a seat on Twitter's board with the deal. [Twitter Blog]

Berlin, Germany based Plazes, a location based social network (and one of the first startups we ever wrote about here on TechCrunch, back in 2005), has been acquired by Finland-based Nokia, the companies are announcing today.

We most recently wrote about Plazes new iPhone application in May 2008, which will take advantage of the cutting edge location technologies available on the phone (cell triangulation and GPS). The company has raised a total of €3.7 million in venture financing over two round, although the last round was closed in February 2007.

Co-founder Felix Petersen told me in a hastily scheduled phone call that the company will maintain its Berlin office and all thirteen employees. The Plazes product will become Nokia's Services & Software unit.

In 2006 Nokia acquired Berlin based Gate5 for a rumored $250 million and turned the product into Nokia Maps, which is deployed in 300 markets. Petersen says the success of that acquisition gave Plazes a lot of comfort in working with Nokia.

As a funny aside, a year ago Petersen was busted by his own product as he avoided one conference to attend another.

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