Comments for Amazon's Bezos Invests in Twitter

Amazon's Bezos Invests in Twitter

2008-06-24T19:14:42Z

Twitter just announced yet another sum of funding, this including money from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezo's fund Bezos Expeditions. The company says the money will be spent on building up its infrastructure and reliability to become the communications utility it needs to be before it can become profitable.

Om Malik unearthed the rumor of this round of funding last month and noted that Spark Capital was believed to be the lead investor. The round is rumored to be for $15 million. Jeff Bezos's involvement was unreported until today.

]]> Though some readers tire of hearing about every little bit of Twitter news, the involvement of the man who invented something so key in defining the web of the future (Amazon) in this little company aiming to redefine online communication should be of general interest. As founders are concerned, Bezos could be called Mr. Scalability - making this an awesome partnership to tackle Twitter's biggest obstacle.

We're excited to see what Twitter will do with the new infusion of cash and expertise. We use Twitter extensively here at RWW.

Thanks to Rob Cottingham for the enriched fail whale image in this post.

Comment from Sebastian on 2008-06-24

2008-06-24T19:38:10Z

They could switch to Amazon AWS services. Twitter being fixed through moving to Amazon AWS - that would be awesome promotion for their web services. ;)

Comment from dc crowley on 2008-06-24

2008-06-24T19:43:49Z

f%$#ing brilliant! Thank you Jeff

Comment from Mike Doeff on 2008-06-24

2008-06-24T20:01:22Z

I like the graphic. I'd like it even more if the birds were replaced by little smiling Jeff Bezos heads with wings.

Comment from web design company on 2008-06-24

2008-06-24T20:23:40Z

Great! Now both services will go down at the same time.

Comment from MG Siegler on 2008-06-24

2008-06-24T20:30:18Z

Amazon invested in Twitter? That would be interesting. Oh Digg users.

Comment from Kingsley Joseph on 2008-06-24

2008-06-24T20:53:47Z

that would explain the outage Amazon had recently

Comment from chantix on 2008-06-24

2008-06-24T21:23:51Z

great post, very informative.

Comment from Todd on 2008-06-24

2008-06-24T21:48:47Z

( Best Obi Wan impersonation ) I sense a great disturbance in the Blogphere...As if a million bloggers all cried out...knowing that with an AWS powered Twitter and five nines uptime, they will have absolutely nothing to blog about...and were suddenly silent.

But seriously, I am super happy for everyone at Obvious, but would invoke JayZ's "Mo' money, mo' problems" and hope Twitter doesn't lose it twitter-ness just because they got a proper sugar daddy now.

Comment from Alex Funk on 2008-06-24

2008-06-24T21:55:30Z

it only makes sense to do this. Twitter is proving its worth and has a extremely loyal crowd no matter how many times they are down.

Once they have the fresh injection of cash, new servers, stability, board, users, plugins, add-ons and widgets do you think they will try to make some money? :))

Comment from Richard Cunningham on 2008-06-24

2008-06-24T23:34:51Z

Maybe twitter can borrow some people from Amazon who have done this before to help scale twitter.

Comment from cease on 2008-06-24

2008-06-25T00:06:53Z

twitters business model will be to charge people to guarantee they won't go down within 24 hours of the last time they were down. For non paying customers, count on it being down more than being up.

Comment from @CoachDeb on 2008-06-24

2008-06-25T01:24:10Z

shucks!
I've been reporting on the 15 million for weeks now
does this mean I'm in the LOOP?! I actually know things
before the rest of the world does?! wow - thanks Twitter!

Comment from Sean on 2008-06-24

2008-06-25T02:45:14Z

The fact that they keep getting funding is AMAZING. Maybe they will use this to redo their entire software system. Perhaps they can invest some of the cash in a real goddamn scripting platform that's not Ruby on Rails.

HOLY SHIT!

Comment from Ajay on 2008-06-25

2008-06-25T07:44:27Z

good news for twitter user

Comment from Matt on 2008-06-25

2008-06-25T14:18:17Z

I sure hope that they can use some of amazon's experience in go big FAST to help out twitter.

Comment from Chuck Burgess on 2008-06-25

2008-06-25T17:41:21Z

I expect a One-Twit shopping patent application from Amazon any minute now...

Comment from Johnny Frost on 2008-06-25

2008-06-25T22:28:10Z

LOL, go Twitter Go!

JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi

Comment from Hutch Carpenter on 2008-06-25

2008-06-25T23:56:56Z

That's really cool. They're not a separate box. They're mixed in with the other comments.

Comment from Duncan Riley on 2008-06-25

2008-06-26T00:01:39Z

cool in one way, but having said that there's also no FF reply built in from what I can see. Someone also needs to hassle Richard about threaded comments.

Comment from Frederic on 2008-06-25

2008-06-26T00:44:34Z

@duncan - I think a reply function is going to be added pretty soon

Comment from mr pibbs on 2008-06-25

2008-06-26T03:22:27Z

Amazon and twitter - isn't this the blind leading the blind?

Comment from Glenn Slaven on 2008-06-26

2008-06-26T11:17:31Z

I gotta say I find it kind of confusing, it's like reading two conversations on top of each other.

Comment from Mark Carey on 2008-06-26

2008-06-26T13:37:38Z

I agree with Sebastian, I can't help but see a connection between AWS and solving the scaling issues at Twitter. What a showcase that would be for AWS.

(Side note: this comment was posted via the RWW comment form and cc.ed to FriendFeed)

Comment from Mark Carey on 2008-06-26

2008-06-26T13:44:36Z

Glenn, in this specific case, that's true. There are two conversations here. The reason is that Frederic linked to the

Comment from Mark Carey on 2008-06-26

2008-06-26T13:47:51Z

Glenn, in this case that is true. There are two conversation here. The reason is that Frederic linked to the "Bezos invests in Twitter" story above, although the conversation he started in unrelated to that story, since the link is just an example of the FriendFeed Comments integration. The plugin looks for links to entries and pulls in the comments -- in the rare case that the FF comments are unrelated to the link, it can seem like two conversation mixed into one.

Comment from Mike Wills on 2008-06-26

2008-06-26T13:57:56Z

How do you do that? Is there a plug-in coming for WordPress?

Comment from Glenn Slaven on 2008-06-26

2008-06-26T14:00:56Z

Fair enough. I was just concerned that you'd get this weird disconnect in the comments. I was toying with the idea of integrating the comments originally for the WordPress plugin, but in the end I went with the separation. I guess this will be a good test to see which works better :)

Comment from J. Phil on 2008-06-26

2008-06-26T14:09:32Z

Liked for the concept. The execution leaves a bit of room for improvement. Still, quite cool!@

Comment from Mark Carey on 2008-06-26

2008-06-26T16:18:41Z

Yes, it will be interesting to see how it compares. Let's continue the discussion over at http://friendfeed.com/e/811496d6-3c34-4b42-9695-27204fe7c4c6, which has a link to a live demo and to the plugin, which has now been released.

Comment from Julian Baldwin on 2008-06-26

2008-06-26T16:26:32Z

Nicely done, fluid with all other comments

Comment from Frederic on 2008-06-26

2008-06-26T23:04:57Z

just as an update: you can now also CC: your comments from RWW to FF

Comment from Tim D on 2008-06-27

2008-06-27T13:51:27Z

Amazon may learn a lot from Twitter.com. Congrads to TWITTER team!

Comment from Ben Kepes on 2008-06-27

2008-06-28T01:08:35Z

It's funny that anytime an already successful entrepreneur invests in a new start-up, everyone decides it has to be a sure thing.

What happened to all those twitter sceptics that blogged about the fact that twitter was;
a) a business with no monetizable model
b) badly executed anyway

Now they're all saying it must be good because Bezos is there. Just remember that the already successful are able to take bigger risks than the bootstrappers - do you think Jeff would really miss the money he put in?

Comment from Cyrius on 2008-06-27

2008-06-28T02:48:49Z

I wonder if Yiying Lu, the creator of the FailWhale - that Twitter bought for about 5 bucks on iStockphoto - is going to get a slice of all these millions for venture capital, for the millions of views of the FailWhale that have endeared people to Twitter, without her seeing much more than about a buck 50?

Comment from Techno Quiz on 2008-07-01

2008-07-01T11:15:48Z

Great!.Hope this will really enforce twitter to fortify its infrastructure.