I wonder if it alienating Gaga/Bieber would turn out any better for them then alienating developers though.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/25/twitter_shoul...
[1] ... Twitter seems to clearly intend to move in the direction of becoming an advertising business.
It seems like a mistake to me, if only because as it currently exists my twitter feed is already full of what amount to ads. A lot of the culprits are people just like me—journalists touting our latest articles. Then you have various other media personalities, celebrities, and authors investing in their personal brand. You have food trucks telling you about their location and local restaurants touting specials and deals. Every big company has one or more corporate twitter accounts these days for PR and marketing purposes. Rather than selling lots of ads on Twitter, Twitter could sell itself as a service to the large number of people and firms who are already organically using it as an advertising tool.
Which is just to say that the Twitter user base seems ideal for a tiered pricing model. Most people on Twitter don't tweet that much, don't have very many followers, and don't particularly aspire to having a large number of followers. Then you have a relatively small minority of heavy users who are deliberately courting a mass Twitter audience. Just charge us! Let everyone with fewer than 500 followers use it for free, and then have a few tiers of pricing for people with large followings. Most people probably have no desire to pay for Twitter, but anyone who's bothered to amass 20,000 is obviously getting a lot of value from access to the Twitter audience and would pay for it. Meanwhile the broad mass of non-professional users could keep using a great no-charge ad-free service that creates the ecosystem pro users want to pay to gain access to.
The problem is that they seem to be overreaching, and doing it in what may be a self-destructive manor.
Text messaging has certainly been driven by user fees. If you look at the tv market it's moved from primarily ad driven to primarily fee driven.
I don't think Twitter should be concerned unless someone builds a better product.
Which is inevitable. Their clients are crappy, otherwise there wouldn't be a third-party ecosystem to piss off in the first place.
Which means their only defense is network effects.
Which means it's probably a bad idea to motivate all your early adopters to find and grow the network that unseats you.
Take a look at the Twitter trends list if you want proof that Twitter caters more to "normal people" than it does "technology" people, here's the #1 trend as I type this: http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23NameATurnOn
Yes, their only defense is their network (which is, in my opinion, their "product"), but the majority of their network is not going to leave because of their developer relations. Twitter are safe as long as an alternative doesn't exist and they provide value to their users.
Twitter aren't stupid, they're not going to be enacting this plan if the majority of their users use third party clients. I suspect the majority of people that do use third party clients are those using "value adding" third party clients, like Hootsuite, and those that use Hootsuite are the people that get value from Twitter's network (for example marketing people) so if Hootsuite shuts down they're not going to quit Twitter, they're going to move to an official client.
If your client annoys people too much, they'll move on too. Nullsoft learned that the hard way with Winamp 3. Gnome may be in the middle of that lesson right now.
> Twitter aren't stupid
Oh come on, that's not an argument. There have been countless examples throughout history of companies (in tech and otherwise) that have done stupid things that have directly contributed to their demise. There's no reason to assume that Twitter won't end up like them.
This will inevitably decrease the amount of "normal people" as active users.
Twitter is run by people, and sometimes people make decisions which are, either at the time or in hindsight, stupid. The argument that companies won't do something because it will damage them has been proved wrong so many times in the past.
I'm not saying that this particular decision is stupid, but the idea that companies always act in some kind of enlightened self-interest make the right decisions to do so is just plain wrong.
But whether MySpace died from Twitter's flavor of incompetence or not is irrelevant to the point that the end result is going to look comically similar.
They use Twitter because they could get constant updates from Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga.
3rd party apps means nothing to them as long as Bieber and Gaga are still on Twitter.
Truth.
> They use Twitter because they could get constant updates from Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga.
Also true.
> The vast majority of Twitter users don't use Twitter because they like the 3rd party apps.
True again.
And entirely missing the point. New technologies are driven by early adopters. And Twitter is in the very unique position of having flipped a lever that alienates that precise population all at once.
So they'll move on to the next big thing, build up the network, and eventually Bieber will move over because it's actually not hard to build a better product than Twitter.
Their only insurance is network effects, and they've undermined that advantage by delivering the most perfect gift basket packed with early adopters to Dalton Caldwell.
This is why you're missing the point.
Twitter isn't "new technology". It's not even a technology company. It is a way for people to get their celebrity fix.
Sure early adopters would move to whatever Dalton Caldwell is building. That's a non-event to 99.9% of Twitter users.
Followers of Lady Gaga don't care what new service Robert Scoble is jumping to.
Its competition will be.
If the world worked the way you're describing, Yahoo would still be king, MySpace would reign supreme and and I'd be using a Blackberry.
In the short term, Twitter will be fine, of course you're right there. I'm not proposing an instantaneous timescale.
In five years, they're fucked.
Good luck trying to compete on technology when the users don't care about technology
> If the world worked the way you're describing, Yahoo would still be king, MySpace would reign supreme and and I'd be using a Blackberry.
...and Craigslist would still be king in local marketplace.
Oh wait, Craigslist IS still king in local marketplace. What happened to all those CL competitors who touted their superior technologies and APIs?
That's right, they all failed because the users don't care about the technologies and the APIs.
I'm so glad we agree on this. Users indeed do not care about technologies or APIs.
They care about great experiences.
Twitter does not excel at great experiences. If they did, third party clients would not have to exist.
Since they do, 23% of Twitter users choose to consume the network via superior-to-them, third-party offerings. Twitter has signed the death warrant of those products. Craigslist would be a valid counter-argument had it been initially built on the strength of third-party clients and then killed them. (PadMapper doesn't count, before you bring it up. It came to craigslist after dominance, not before.)
Twitter, on the other hand, has two native clients that began their very lives as third-party products.
We'll see. Maybe Twitter will be just fine after taking their most engaged users and sending them elsewhere.
Or maybe the users will follow their tech-savvy friends to a better experience, which again, isn't a hard category to trounce Twitter in.
> Since they do, 23% of Twitter users choose to consume the network via superior-to-them, third-party offerings.
So what you're saying is that the vast majority (77%) of Twitter users choose the native Twitter offerings because they offer superior experiences.
OK.
Twitter is an experience. I actually hardly use it because all I can figure out it is good for is passively receiving spam from people I am following as they try to market their ventures to me.
But I recognize that early adopters mean nothing in this context, technology is irrelevant. You guys need to start trying to create some real tech and stop this fantasy that markup is some kind of high tech stuff in 2012.
I think you just made Twitter's point for them. Yes, their current apps have problems, but I think they are really worried about the varied Twitter experience people are having on all of the various implementation of it. If someone has a bad experience on Echofon, they might blame that on Twitter, so I think you are right, and this is Twitters (possibly flawed) way of holding onto that.
You haven't made a case for why this distinction matters. I don't think it does.
Early adopters influence the populace when it comes to new experiences. Any new twitter clone is not a new experience. If twitter already solves the "celebrity fix" problem, it doesn't matter how new or shiny its technological superior will be. No one will care. This is exactly why CL is still king, why Facebook is still king, and why twitter has nothing to worry about.
(Myspace was different in that facebook had the "cool" factor that myspace never had).
Which is why I believe what nerds are ranting about on HN does make a difference. I would guess that other users will never find out about certain stuff unless the serious nerds let them- they are the "trend makers" so to speak. Whether popularity equals instant and lasting profit is another question. But no one can deny Twitter has become very popular. It's valuable because it's useful, even if it's not a winner in terms of profitability. (Much like Wikipedia.)
Contrast this with the enormous number of developers who are focused on some mythical end user they can speculate about and that they know they can easily manipulate. Or with folks who are using PR and the tech media to fool investors and generate short-lived buzz amongst less savvy users. Internet VC guilty as charged. These guys are usually rational and know the scent of money a little better. But they cannot control what becomes popular, not like a mob of irrational, fussy nerds can.
Free stuff frustrates a lot of developers. But do not forget the internet is in its infancy. We're still trying to get stuff working. That Twitter even works (the SMS part) is a blessing.
Will App.net be able to make agreements with all the telcos as Twitter did? We shall see.
Are there any ground breaking Twitter applications that are keeping users around? If not, why would they need to make themselves a platform?
Conversely, I use no third-party Facebook applications, unless you count FB Connect as a more than a SSO mechanism (i.e., I'm not actually using FB or its network benefits on any site/app using FBC).
What decision specifically are you talking about?
So now that the obvious is out of the way – we'll look back one day and see this as the day Twitter fucked the dog.
They've made a decision that motivates the very core of early adopters who embraced Twitter to move on.
Yeah, they have to make money. They've convinced themselves the experience must be entirely under their control to do it. Okay. And maybe that's so.
And maybe they'll squeeze some pennies out for awhile.
In the meantime, there's a group of folks who first jumped into Twitter during the days where you weren't chained to their mediocre user products. They'll start the move to a better network.
And one day, everyone will look around and see all that's left on Twitter is the glitter gif morons and big brands with more money than sense, just as happened with MySpace.