Twitter has just announced that it has raised yet more venture capital funding, this time from Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners. The company isn’t disclosing how much money was raised, but the news follows rumors last month that Twitter was taking on an additional $20+ million at a valuation of $250 million.
The red-hot microblogging tool previously raised rounds of $15 million and $5.4 million. In a blog post, Biz Stone of Twitter writes, “We weren’t actively seeking more funding because significant capital from last year’s partnership with Bijan and his team at Spark is still in the bank. Nevertheless, our strong growth attracted interest and we decided to accept a unique opportunity to make Twitter even stronger with a very attractive offer.”
And while that money buys Twitter more time to actually generate revenue, Stone assures us that is also in the works. “We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products,” he writes.
In any event, while the business model remains a mystery, it’s clear Twitter is in it for the long-haul, and despite onlookers constantly questioning how they’ll make money, the company still has plenty of time to figure it out, on their own schedule.
Update: VentureBeat reports that the amount raised was $35 million.
Most Popular Twitter Clients Revealed
The micro-messaging service Twitter became popular in part due to the thousands of different ways to post and view Tweets…but what are the most popular ways to share your Tweets with the world?
The Twitter analytics service TwitStat is continually running the numbers and provides us with the following, fascinating list. Unsurprisingly, most users post from the Twitter website, but the desktop app TweetDeck is a very popular way to post - more than 10% of the users surveyed were posting from it (see our TweetDeck vs Twhirl review for more info on TweetDeck).
When the Twitter search service Summize became popular, Twitter acquired it. Would it make sense, then, for Twitter to buy TweetDeck, considering its huge lead in the desktop Twitter software market?
Top 10 Twitter Clients
TwitStat’s current top 10 list is below, showing ranking and % of users posting from each service today. Note that where users made use of multiple methods, all were counted. The list is constantly changing, and the Top 100 can be found here.
1 Web - 29.57%
2 TweetDeck - 10.58%
3 Twitterfeed - 5.54%
4 Twhirl - 4.92 %
5 Twitterrific - 3.79 %
6 Tweetie - 3.65%
7 Text - 3.40 %
8 Mobile web 3.00 %
9 TwitterFon - 2.96 %
10 TwitPic - 2.94 %
Twitter's popularity has surged, despite its lack of a business model, and has garnered plenty of media attention since mid-2008: President Obama planned to use Twitter to announce his running mate at the start of the election, CNN covered how breaking news spread through the service, and VCs have even invested in Twitter-related startups like TweetDeck and StockTwits. Meanwhile, Twitter has been the subject of acquisition rumors (including a botched deal with Facebook)?and all this for a company that only recently hired its first
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