Punch in the terms ‘Twitter’ and ‘survive’ into Google and in under a second there are close to eighteen million returns on sources that share both words. Will Twitter survive financially? Will it survive the hype? Will the microblogging service survive the SXSW convention? Assuming Twitter does reach profitability it will likely be due in some measure to third party application developers like Bob Brinker and Mike Ormsby and their company TwitDoc.com, a firm that allows Twitter users to share the content of many popular file types (PDF, DOC, XLS, GIF, JPEG, PNG, AVI, WMV ) as easily as they currently broadcast shortened web links.
The secret sauce of TwitDoc – and what separates the service from competitors FileSocial and FileTwt – rests in the company’s viewer, a window that opens like a browser to display the sought content. Says Brinker, “one click and you’re viewing the content from that file.” No downloading takes place, nor does the user need to have the underlying software, affording TwitDoc several advantages. First, access is available to customers regardless of client or device allowing viewing on mobile devices that do not include office software. Second, both the actual and perceived danger of viewing a file fall drastically when there is nothing downloaded to one’s computer. Third, by running everything through TwitDocs’s viewer the company has a platform to display advertising, which is currently its primary source of revenue.
Brinker began using Twitter a little over two years ago and, like many others, wondered the best way to deploy the service. Long before his foray into Twitter, Brinker has been pondering communication platforms including publishing a financial investment newsletter, the Brinker Fixed Income Advi$or. Eventually he realized that aspects of Twitter would be superb for communicating financial information, but “research in the financial world is document driven.” So he set out to solve his own problem.
Like Twitter itself, the CEO could not predict the number of different ways clients have used TwitDoc: “Customer growth has been entirely organic. We have commercial and residential realtors publishing marketing materials on new properties, job seekers posting resumes, employers and recruiters posting job information, Mom’s clubs posting recipes, and yes, people posting financial research.” When asked if he expected Flickr’s recent release of its Twitter application would upset his business model, Brinker replied with a shrug, “Photos aren’t our driver.”
So what is the driver of the startup? Execution on simplicity. Explains Brinker, Twitdoc does not store or host any of the material that passes through its site: “We’re a router…we don’t want to host all that. There are already great sources to do that for you.” As a result, Twitdoc has partnered with some high profile firms, including Scribd for documents and Blip.tv for video files.
From a revenue perspective, Brinker anticipates a few other streams outside of the advertising route. First, he believes, there could be sales found in marketing a branded viewer. Such a white label service could be sold to companies which publish large quantities of content and want to brand their material with customized branding and security. Additionally, he envisions a TwitDoc marketplace, where sellers offer content for micropayments, with the transaction and content delivery handled by the company.
Twitter is a famously open platform for developers, so there is some irony in what Brinker sees as his primary obstacle to success: The rise and rule of a handful of Twitter clients – like Tweetdeck, Seesmic, and Twhirl – that now control the interface between the users and the datastream. “There are a half dozen clients that own Twitter.” Just like the real estate on a computer’s desktop, the interfaces published by these clients can make or break a third party developer, offering exposure to millions of power users or perhaps instead advancing a competitor. The TwitDoc website asks users to contact their client to incorporate TwitDoc in the next version of the software, but Brinker hopes he’ll cut to the head of the line on product quality alone.
Brinker sees alternative visions for the future. “We have two roadmaps,” he says. In one version, TwitDoc is established as a business with a regular operating revenue. In the second, the startup “is acquired by a document company; someone like Adobe, Microsoft, or Xerox.” But which ever of those versions play out, Brinker is resolute on one milestone shared by both plans: “Our goal is to become the source for sharing your documents on Twitter.”
