Marketing Pilgrim

<Somewhere in Twitter HQ>

“So, Ev, if I understand you correctly, there isn’t actually any revenue to count at the moment?”

“No, Ali, we hired you because we were hoping you’d bring your collection of Pixar dvds in for us to watch when the Fail Whale appears.”

If it’s not Ali Rowghani’s movie collection that Twitter wanted, it must be that the microblogging service has hired the Pixar executive because–gasp–Twitter’s primed to make some actual profits!

“Ali will be an important member of a growing team focused on creating value for our users and capturing the financial opportunities that result from it,” Twitter CEO Evan Williams said in a release. Rowghani had been at Pixar for nearly a decade. “His thoughtfulness on retaining a great culture to work and staying consistent with our principles will also be a significant contribution.”

Question: How long does it take for a new CEO of a social media falling star to get his walking papers these days?

Answer: If you are Owen Van Natta of MySpace it takes just about 9 months.

Wow, I wonder if the time went quickly? It seems like just yesterday that the announcement of the former Facebook executive’s hiring was the start of a new era at MySpace that would make its climb back to the top of the social media heap. Instead the only news the site seems to generate is just how poorly it has performed and how much of waste of money and time it has been for News Corp. who acquired the company back in 2005 for $580 million.

In case you are wondering about the title of this post, you need to do two things. Stop thinking about Google Buzz for a minute (please!) and also try to remember a song from way back when called “I Ran (So Far Away)” by Flock of Seagulls. Now sing the chorus using the title of the post and you’ll get it. See? Clever, right?

Anyway, it appears that while Iran has marked February 11th as a day of reckoning for the west (something to do with uranium which doesn’t matter to the Internet marketing world because we have to sell things, right?) I have to guess that their biggest announcement must have been how they are going to suspend Gmail services in Iran. Boy, if you want to hurt the west, screw uranium, go after Google. Now, that’s playing hardball.

The Wall Street Journal reports

We’ve all seen it coming for a long time: whether Google was buying dark fiber, or bidding on the wireless spectrum, or hiring former telephone execs, we all love a rumor about Google setting up Internet infrastructure. But this time it’s no rumor: Google admits they’re building high speed broadband networks in select markets. But unlike their previous Utopian visions, this ain’t no free ride:

We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

Maybe AOL decided their Q4 news wasn’t enough to keep them in the headlines this week—but they’re back again. Of course, it’s hard to stay out of the headlines when you’re making a deal with the most popular social network in the world.

That’s right, Facebook and AOL are hooking up—and in a fairly literal way. AOL’s popular chat client, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), is integrating with Facebook’s chat feature. According to Forbes:

Starting today, AIM users will be able to chat with their Facebook friends through their AIM accounts. They’ll also be able to import so-called news feeds and “wall” posts to AIM and export status updates, videos, links, and photos to Facebook.

So what’s the deal? Is Twitter slowing down or speeding up? Reports of slowing of growth in visitors and accounts of Twitter has created a stir for some. Unfortunately for Twitter that is the price of a ‘hockey stick’ growth pattern which is associated with rapid mass appeal. It’s every business’ dream but goes up must come down at least a little. Trouble is, that kind of growth is unsustainable and then the non-thinking nay-sayers come out of the woodwork with their doomsday predictions about the future (full disclosure: I suspect I have fallen into this category at times. Guilty as charged.)