I disagree: their model is no longer unique. Moreover, they don't offer any particular feature that separates them from other similar models. The best they have to offer is the user base, and the right name-brand shiny shiny with a few choice features would take most of them away. - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

too low? alternatively you could buy just about any pro sports team ... I'd rather have that, with, you know, that $500M I have laying around :-) - Adam Ostrow

Tina - I disagree that the next shiny thing can dethrone Twitter. Plurk was shiny, but didn't really take off. I really believe Twitter has now hit escape veolicty, where the network effect just makes it stronger and stronger. - Hutch Carpenter

Adam - LOL. Cubs maybe...Still, I think Twitter's got the momentum now. - Hutch Carpenter

I tend to agree with Hutch, Tina. Twitter has something which has made people, who like/dislike it, stick with it. That something is part first mover advantage, part the simplicity and part the user base. It will be tough to dethrone twitter. That said, I don't quite find $500 Mil. a low price. - Parth Awasthi

especially in the current market, 500Mil is a good valuation. I'm not sure what it is based on, though - i guess the value creation will come if you can use twitter to do things in an efficient way - tweets to set up meetings which can record agreement and trigger calendar addition, stuff like that. Tweets that book a hotel or book a cab, or trigger pizza delivery. Surveys by tweet. All these could be monetizable without annoying the user base. - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

The 500M was in Facebook stock at a $15 billion valuation. From Twitter's perspective, that probably makes the deal worth quite a bit less. - Matt Pfefferle

Good call Matt - Facebook is inflated. And I like Joelle's sense of the "platform" that Twitter can be. - Hutch Carpenter

Hutch? LOL Facebook NEEDS Twitter to monetize. - Mona Nomura

Mona - good one. That was Facebook's hail mary? - Hutch Carpenter

I think if Twitter users have dealt with all the network outages and still has such a huge loyal user base, that proves its staying power against competition. - Aram Zucker-Scharff

Right now (imo) Facebook is scrambling to find a way to profit and the salesforce integration towards enterprise (aka world domination) won't be implemented any time soon. They threw too damn far and the ball went out the park - right into Hunters Point haha! - Mona Nomura

What in god's name makes Twitter worth any more than the servers it's running on, let alone $500 million? - Eric P

I'd only put a value on twitter when I can see revenue details - how much money are they making now? (I can guess at that figure) But the best thing would be what plans do they have for harnessing their technology into a real, main revenue stream, if that involves the word advertising I'd refuse to put anything other than a negative value on it. If they respond with licensing deals and support contracts then I'd say they would have a real value. - alphaxion

Eric P - I'm looking at it as the defining, primary platform for the way people will communicate in the future. It enables one-to-one and one-to-many outbound communications. It also has a terrific data mining play that mixes both content and people. - Hutch Carpenter

Dion Hinchcliffe has a nice take on this today: http://bit.ly/twitter_value - Hutch Carpenter

It's a glorified IM network, only less functional because it's a centralized platform with an absurd character limit that only the most ADD among us can find usable. I'll hand it to their marketing department though that they managed to get all the techies in the echo chamber to drink their kool aid. (The preceding is 302 characters, BTW). - Eric P

Hey Eric P. - you're gonna have to talk to the big fella about that: http://twitter.com/THE_REA... - Hutch Carpenter