AP-CNBC poll: Twitter faces skeptical investors

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By BARBARA ORTUTAY

NEW YORK (AP) - Twitter faces skepticism from potential investors and the broader public ahead of its initial public offering, according to an Associated Press-CNBC poll released Monday.

Some 36 percent of Americans say buying stock in the 7-year-old short messaging service would be a good investment, while 47 percent disagree. Last May, ahead of Facebook's IPO, 51 percent of Americans said Facebook Inc. (FB) would be a good investment. Just 31 percent didn't agree.

Twitter plans to make its Wall Street debut this week and surprisingly, 52 percent of people ages 18 to 34 say investing in the company's stock is not a good idea.

Twitter Inc. (TWTR) will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning after setting a price for its IPO sometime Wednesday evening. As it stands, the San Francisco-based company plans to raise as much as $1.6 billion in the process. The transaction values Twitter at as much as $12.5 billion. That's little more than one-eighth of Facebook's roughly $104 billion market value when it went public.

FULL story at link.



Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20131104/DA9RK0R82.html

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[starroute]

1. Have they figured out how to make money without being annoying?

The problem with Twitter is that it's a useful resource as long as it's an open platform -- but in order to get any profit out of it, it has to be squeezed pretty hard.

People who are currently dealing with too many tweets in a day aren't eager to see unsolicited advertising cluttering up their stream.

Twitter has already made it impossible to follow people using an RSS feed, which killed what little use I had for it. They want everything kept in-house, but that just makes the service less accessible.

And there's also that little problem of releasing private information to the US government.

I suspect we may eventually see an open-source, non-US based competitor to Twitter that can be accessed and built upon without restrictions. And if that happens, Twitter goes the way of MySpace.