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 $15 million. Jeff Bezos's involvement was unreported until today.
Though some readers tire of hearing about every little bit of Twitter news, the involvement of the man who invented something so key in defining the web of the future (Amazon) in this little company aiming to redefine online communication should be of general interest. As founders are concerned, Bezos could be called Mr. Scalability - making this an awesome partnership to tackle Twitter's biggest obstacle.
We're excited to see what Twitter will do with the new infusion of cash and expertise. We use Twitter extensively here at RWW.
Thanks to Rob Cottingham for the enriched fail whale image in this post.
Comments
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They could switch to Amazon AWS services. Twitter being fixed through moving to Amazon AWS - that would be awesome promotion for their web services. ;)
Posted by: Sebastian | June 24, 2008 12:38 PM
f%$#ing brilliant! Thank you Jeff
Posted by: dc crowley | June 24, 2008 12:43 PM
I like the graphic. I'd like it even more if the birds were replaced by little smiling Jeff Bezos heads with wings.
Posted by: Mike Doeff
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June 24, 2008 1:01 PM
Great! Now both services will go down at the same time.
Posted by: web design company | June 24, 2008 1:23 PM
Amazon invested in Twitter? That would be interesting. Oh Digg users.
Posted by: MG Siegler
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June 24, 2008 1:30 PM
that would explain the outage Amazon had recently
Posted by: Kingsley Joseph
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June 24, 2008 1:53 PM
great post, very informative.
Posted by: chantix | June 24, 2008 2:23 PM
( 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.
Posted by: Todd | June 24, 2008 2:48 PM
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? :))
Posted by: Alex Funk | June 24, 2008 2:55 PM
Maybe twitter can borrow some people from Amazon who have done this before to help scale twitter.
Posted by: Richard Cunningham | June 24, 2008 4:34 PM
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.
Posted by: cease | June 24, 2008 5:06 PM
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!
Posted by: @CoachDeb | June 24, 2008 6:24 PM
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!
Posted by: Sean | June 24, 2008 7:45 PM
good news for twitter user
Posted by: Ajay | June 25, 2008 12:44 AM
I sure hope that they can use some of amazon's experience in go big FAST to help out twitter.
Posted by: Matt | June 25, 2008 7:18 AM
I expect a One-Twit shopping patent application from Amazon any minute now...
Posted by: Chuck Burgess | June 25, 2008 10:41 AM
LOL, go Twitter Go!
JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi
Posted by: Johnny Frost | June 25, 2008 3:28 PM
That's really cool. They're not a separate box. They're mixed in with the other comments.
Posted by: Hutch Carpenter
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June 25, 2008 4:56 PM
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.
Posted by: Duncan Riley
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June 25, 2008 5:01 PM
@duncan - I think a reply function is going to be added pretty soon
Posted by: Frederic
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June 25, 2008 5:44 PM
Amazon and twitter - isn't this the blind leading the blind?
Posted by: mr pibbs | June 25, 2008 8:22 PM
I gotta say I find it kind of confusing, it's like reading two conversations on top of each other.
Posted by: Glenn Slaven
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June 26, 2008 4:17 AM
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)
Posted by: Mark Carey
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June 26, 2008 6:37 AM
Glenn, in this specific case, that's true. There are two conversations here. The reason is that Frederic linked to the
Posted by: Mark Carey
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June 26, 2008 6:44 AM
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.
Posted by: Mark Carey
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June 26, 2008 6:47 AM
How do you do that? Is there a plug-in coming for WordPress?
Posted by: Mike Wills
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June 26, 2008 6:57 AM
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 :)
Posted by: Glenn Slaven
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June 26, 2008 7:00 AM
Liked for the concept. The execution leaves a bit of room for improvement. Still, quite cool!@
Posted by: J. Phil
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June 26, 2008 7:09 AM
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.
Posted by: Mark Carey
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June 26, 2008 9:18 AM
Nicely done, fluid with all other comments
Posted by: Julian Baldwin
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June 26, 2008 9:26 AM
just as an update: you can now also CC: your comments from RWW to FF
Posted by: Frederic
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June 26, 2008 4:04 PM
Amazon may learn a lot from Twitter.com. Congrads to TWITTER team!
Posted by: Tim D | June 27, 2008 6:51 AM
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?
Posted by: Ben Kepes | June 27, 2008 6:08 PM
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?
Posted by: Cyrius | June 27, 2008 7:48 PM
Great!.Hope this will really enforce twitter to fortify its infrastructure.
Posted by: Techno Quiz | July 1, 2008 4:15 AM