Is Pheed the New Twitter?
Miley Cyrus seems to think so. As does Ashley Tisdale, David Guetta, Paris Hilton, Chris Brown, and thousands of others who have joined the site in a matter of days. — So what is Pheed? — In short, think of it as Twitter, with a business plan.
Context & Ripple Effects
Pheed is entering a social-network market in which Twitter had already moved beyond earlier rivals such as Bebo and LinkedIn, while MySpace was declining in the corpus’s 2009 coverage. Twitter’s own early Hollywood outreach made celebrity participation a proven way to amplify a platform’s visibility.
The timing matters because Twitter is preparing for an IPO, while Pheed is being framed around a business model rather than audience growth alone. High-profile sign-ups give Pheed attention, but also make its ability to convert that attention into a durable service the central test.
First-order effects
- Miley Cyrus, Ashley Tisdale, David Guetta, Paris Hilton and Chris Brown give Pheed an immediate promotional channel and a celebrity-led initial user base.
- Twitter gains a visible challenger in the celebrity social-media conversation as it prepares for an IPO.
Second-order effects
- Celebrity-driven services must compete for entertainers’ posts and followers, making exclusive attention and monetization positioning more important than a simple Twitter-like feature set.
- Pheed’s business-plan framing raises the competitive bar for platforms seeking to turn social attention into revenue rather than relying solely on user growth.
Third-order effects
- If celebrity audiences prove portable between services, social platforms will face a more fluid distribution market in which star participation can accelerate adoption but does not itself create a durable network.
- The contrast between Pheed’s revenue pitch and Twitter’s IPO preparation points toward social-media competition being judged increasingly on monetization as well as scale.
The trend: Social platforms are moving from growth-first competition toward a contest over whether celebrity attention can be converted into a sustainable business.