There has been much hype about Twitter going public from the day they announced it with a tweet. Since their launch in the month of July 2006, everyone had anticipated their ‘coming-out’ yet it seemed as if they had dragged it on for a few years, probably because of Facebook’s failure in their IPO. Anyways, the question on everyone’s mind is; will this be a successful strategic move by Twitter or would this be Facebook all over?

In my opinion…actually, I don’t have an opinion because in this case in particular, I really cannot anticipate how Twitter would adapt to this huge change.

What could very potentially happen is that Twitter’s IPO would be another failure similar to Facebook. The simple fact is, it is impossible to accurately calculate the value of these social-network giants because almost all of their value comes from ambiguities such as “potential”. And because the internet-based markets are very dynamic, it is usually a misrepresentation of the company. Therefore they are allowed to argue their current value based on their future potential value, making their current values ridiculously over-valued.

The other possible outcome from this IPO is that Twitter ends up upsetting their customers in order to meet the shareholders’ demands for more revenue. This would most probably be done when Twitter integrates more advertisements into twitter used on platforms such as a smart phone.

Whether the IPO fails or Twitter compromises their integrity one thing is for certain, the founders and the early investors are probably smirking in their Jacuzzis with a bottles of vintage Dom Perignon, thinking about how they are going to spend their millions (or even a billion for Evan Williams).

http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2013/09/twitter-s-ipo