14 DAY TRIAL // While visiting Japan for the launch of the local version of Twitter mobile website, it seems that Biz Stone decided to put an end to the rumors on the web and declared that the continuously expanding micro-blogging network was definitely not for sale.
One of the most intriguing but also fascinating aspects about Twitter is that its popularity did not bring any financial profit to its founders. There are members who use their profiles for promoting products or putting up discounts, thus gaining money via Twitter. Even though the company itself is not gaining any revenue, analysts have valued it at around $1 billion.
Predictably enough, large companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook have approached Twitter representatives in order to talk about a partnership or even an acquisition. The strategy is to always try to get a share of the trendiest platform of the moment, and this is currently Twitter.
On a different note, the social network's co-founders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, have recently started working on a totally different project, namely making wine. It appears that Twitter has obtained its own wine label in collaboration with the San Francisco winery Crushpad. Furthermore, there will be two types of the beverage that will be sold by Fledgling Wine, each bottle for $20, and all the obtained profits (which will amount to $5 from every sold bottle) will be redirected to Room to Read.
“For each bottle you buy, $5 will be donated to Room to Read, a transformational non-profit that brings books, libraries and ultimately literacy to people in the poorest areas around the world. The efforts of Room to Read will benefit literacy, and in doing so they’ll allow Twitter to grow. Because if you can’t read you can’t Tweet!”
Besides letting the world know of their latest project involving wine making and selling, Biz Stone also said while in Tokyo that Twitter was not looking to be purchased by any company in the market: “Twitter is not interested in being acquired by a bigger company. We want to build an impressive company on our own and we believe that we can.”
In other words, Twitter stays true to its promise to focus more on developing value for users rather than making profit on the way. After all, Twitter did start out as a side project, and it was its innovations and reliability that helped the micro-blogging service gain so much traction among its users, thus becoming the widely spread networking platform that even surprised its founders with its rapid growth.