File this one under the “No Surprise” heading in the VC database: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, the guy who is probably the most closely identified with Web 2.0 apps — if only because he seems to have one of every kind of Web widget in the sidebars on his blog — has funded Twitter, the micro-blogging service with the 140-character limit.
For anyone unfamiliar with Twitter, it is like the status update on Facebook but without the Facebook part. It is a quick way of updating people on what you’re doing/thinking/feeling/eating, etc. If you’re Robert Scoble, it’s a way for you to spam thousands of people with details on your every thought and movement (just kidding, Scobie), and there are add-ons like the audio Twittergram and so on that I don’t really know anything about. At the moment, with Twitter and Facebook and Pownce.com and MSN and GTalk and half a dozen other things, I have so many status update services that I’m overwhelmed.
In other words, I’ve pretty much given up, and Twitter now just pushes blog posts out to whoever is following me, and I track some other people’s blog posts the same way. Is it worth investing in? Fred seems to think so (and so do Marc Andreessen and some others), although even Fred admits he’s not sure what the business model is. I’m not sure either.