John Battelle is pretty dismissive in his recent post about Twitter.  Not dismissive about Twitter — the opposite:  he’s dissing a report in the NY Times by Sanford Bernstein analysts that Twitter will never develop a revenue stream. Sanford Bernstein says that Twitter is unlikely ever to generate positive cash flow, and will either just fail or last until it is overcome by the next web 2.0 phenomena.

In retort, Battelle says:

Twitter is a very promising service directly in the center of these trends [web 2.0 business applications], trends the “analysts” at Sanford Bernstein clearly do not grasp.

Battelle lists 3 ways Twitter might monetize its traffic:

1. Tweetsense – an advertising platform somehow linked to the content of the tweets.
2. Branded licensing – Twitter collects fees to promote Twitter-based services, for example.
3. SMS revenue sharing – Twitter drives millions of SMS to mobile devices, and there may be some leverage for them to share these revenues.

This deal is not done, but from Battelle’s history with search and the evolution of the online conversation, I wouldn’t bet against him on this one.  And it doesn’t take much imagination to see how powerful Twitter can be as a conversation-carrier that is loaded with search and linking potential.

Advertising Age posts some data about Facebook and MySpace becoming more evenly populated by the generations.  What was once the outpost of mostly young people (after all, Facebook started as a college-only networking tool), is fast becoming a communication tool for people of all ages.

The largest group now on Facebook is aged 35 – 44, and the fastest growing segment is age 55+.  Don’t have your parents in your network if you don’t want them to hear about that long weekend fling, OK?  Some very interesting inter-generational things going on here.

But is it really ‘uncool’?  Not yet.  The numbers only show that the older generations are catching up.  Facebook is still the #1 Internet destination for college aged people, ahead of Google and Yahoo.  The big numbers are there for ALL generations, so if you target youth, go for it.  If you want to aim at their parents, still go for it, knowing that the proportion you will reach is less than for the young set (but growing).

As always, stay tuned.  This is moving so fast that we could see that sharply UP trajectory for Facebook to turn sharply down overnight as people get tired of keeping up with their online networks.  Or, what might have the same effect, prune them back to what they really wanted in the first place:  a network for real friends only which would be in most cases much smaller, much less ‘viral’.

In an interesting bit of research recently published, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that Internet participation has been increasing across ALL generations.  No surprise, the younger you are the more likely you go online using more channels (there’s a lot more 20-somethings at MySpace than there are older boomers).  But important to note that age is almost irrelevant to some kinds of online activities, like researching products:  all ages do that at about the same rate.

In other words, SEARCH and using online resources to learn about products and services is so common at all ages that it is a MUST for marketers no matter what you are marketing.

Greg Sterling over at Search Engine Land posted some nice graphics about Pew’s Generations Online project.  I’ll share a couple tidbits here, but you might want to check it out.

It wasn’t surprising to me that the Gen X (ages 33-44) and younger Boomers (ages 45-54) make up a big chunk of the adult Internet population (45% of it between them), although the younger Gen Y group is proportionally larger (ages 18-32 with 30%).  And it wasn’t too surprising to see the pattern of certain Internet activities across these generations:  the younger you are the more likely to play online games, use social networking sites, or create a blog.

But what was a little surprising, and encouraging, was that for some activities, there is very little difference in participation rates across generations.  94% of Gen Y use email; 91% of the Silent Generation (ages 64-72) do.  90% of Gen Y use search engines; 85% of Silent.  65% of Gen Y makes online travel reservations; Silent: 69%.  Research products online:  Gen Y – 84%; Silent – 73%.

You get the picture.  Why it matters is this:  the activities that are most likely to lead to sales are common across generations.  Until we get a better handle on how to use all the social sharing, social networking, social news sites out there for marketing products, this will probably continue to be true.  And the change toward social media marketing is not going to be an easy road — the participants in those networks are sophisticated about their independence, and they (mostly) do not want direct marketing appeals.

We are left with limited options for social media marketing.  One important avenue is brand development.  Companies that operate in niches where they can have an impact via brand can benefit from participating in social media.

Of course, then they have to actually participate actively and faithfully, and that’s another story.

The holiday season was a disaster for lots of retailers, but the glimmer of good news is that online retail held up quite well:  it is a low cost platform!  Take a look at this post from SEOBook for more on this.

Just had to share a link to Oblong and g-speak with you.  Check it out.

Howard Dean made a splash with web-based fundraising four years ago, but this election was astounding for Obama’s use of the Internet for organizing at the grass(net)roots. I am sure the pundits are all correct that politics has changed permanently because of this — we’ll see more and more effort devoted to netizens in the future.  Here’s a couple interesting articles on the phenomenon. First, a review of search queries as political election predictors:  using Google’s Insight, Aaron Goldman matches up queries as predictions against the actual outcomes of the election.  Next, see Christine Beardsell’s nice article on the explosion in the use of video in the recent election, including some very influential user generated content (remember will.i.am’s ‘yes we can’ video?).  Christine argues that the Internet by its nature will demand more transparency and honesty from candidates:  do you agree?