Interesting, if long, post in ZDNet today about the Twitteriztion of Media titled Get ready for the ‘Twitterization’ of mainstream media by David Berlind. The part I related to was this little gem:
"…A couple of days ago, I noted how Twitter is the sort of technology that could completely up-end subscription-driven outfits like Bloomberg or Reuters. Investors subscribe to these services and sit in front of giant consoles as editors from these organizations spit out one-liners at them — one-liners with material information to investors — in near real-time. In other words, if there’s a reporter at a financial briefing for some public company and an executive of that company makes an important forward looking statement, that statement will appear on the consoles of thousands of investors within seconds of it being uttered.
On the investor side, there’s a stream of these one-liners about everything that’s important to them flowing by their consoles like a river. The secret sauce is not just in the business process (a chain of talented writers and editors who feed the system), but also in the infrastructure that facilitates that process: a proprietary infrastructure that, as far as I can tell, has been completely cloned by the likes of Twitter and Twitter-competitor Pownce.
Publishing one-liners takes only as long as it takes to type the one-liner. Subscribing to a source of one-liners the way an investor might subscribe to Bloomberg’s information services takes only seconds as well. Whereas Bloomberg puts a sophisticated system in the hands of an exclusive group of people on a private network, Twitter and Pownce make such a system available to everyone on the Web. Bloomberg gives subscribers a means of instantly offering feedback to publishers. For example, as it was once described to me by a Bloomberg editor, “If we don’t get the information into the system in time for investors to make key decisions, it could cost them millions of dollars. When they lose millions of dollars, you hear about it right way. They’re very quick to tell you you’re late.” I haven’t played with Pownce yet (I’ve reached out to the folks at Pownce but have yet to hear back), but Twitter offers precisely the same private feedback capability."
That's a bombshell. No doubt, there's more behind The Bloomberg or Reuters services than the infrastructure - but, within this year, within the last 6 months, all of that infrastructure has, more or less, become irrelevant.
"…it isn’t hard to imagine a world where experts who don’t work for Bloomberg or Reuters (ones who are just as good at feeding one-liners to investors) start to publish useful, timely, and material information using a tool like Twitter. It’s equally unimaginative to picture investors subscribing to those feeds. They’ll do anything and consider any information that comes their way in an effort to beat other investors to the punch."
It just goes to show how building an advantage on Technology, is vulnerable to further advances in technology.
