I just saw this popup on FriendFeed and rubbed my eyes. They couldn’t be serious - $4.2 for a freeware application (Twhirl) that only exists because of another service; Twitter, that could very well be heading into some extremely stormy water itself. So I clicked through to Loic Le Meur’s blog and found the following post:
Twittermath (thanks, @ann_steckel for the formula). Twitter is raising funds at a $60 to $150 pre-money valuation. That is great news and I would like to congratulate my Twitter friends and wish them good luck to close the round. Now some Twittermath.
Twhirl represents about 7% of all the tweets being sent daily, so I am happy to announce we are raising funds at a $4.2 million pre-money valuation.
Our business model? We will find out but trust me it will be huge. Given the market price of a tweet or of a follower these days it will be huge.
I’m sorry but this is just plain nuts. Twitter itself is out shopping for another round of VC financing in order to stay alive. Along with that it has no apparent business model for monetizing the service and now we have an application that only exists because of Twitter out looking for its own VC funding.
I think something has jumped a shark somewhere … not sure where … but somewhere.
Update: now according to the comments of his post it’s all a joke - what you couldn’t wait until next April 1st Loic?
