Twitter and third-party Twitter developers

I can’t remember the last time the tech world was so interesting. First, innovation is at an all time high. Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and even Microsoft (in the non-monopoly divisions) are making truly exciting products. Second, since the battles are between platforms, the strategic issues are complex, involving complementary network effects.

Twitter’s moves this week were particular interesting. A lot of third-party developers were unhappy. I think this is mainly a result of Twitter having sent mixed signals over the past few years. Twitter’s move into complementary areas was entirely predictable – it happens with every platform provider. The real problem is that somehow Twitter had convinced the world they were going to “let a thousand flowers bloom” – as if they were a non-profit out to save the world, or that they would invent some fantastic new business model that didn’t encroach on third-party developers. This week Twitter finally started acting like what it is: a well-financed company run by smart capitalists.

This mixed signaling has been exacerbated by the fact that Twitter has yet to figure out a business model (they sold data to Microsoft & Google but this is likely just one-time R&D purchases). Maybe Twitter thinks they know what their business model is and maybe they’ll even announce it soon. But whatever they think or announce will only truly be their business model when and if it delivers on their multi-billion dollar aspirations. It will likely be at least a year or two before that happens.

Normally, when third parties try to predict whether their products will be subsumed by a platform, the question boils down to whether their products will be strategic to the platform. When the platform has an established business model, this analysis is fairly straightforward (for example, here is my strategic analysis of Google’s platform). If you make games for the iPhone, you are pretty certain Apple will take their 30% cut and leave you alone. Similarly, if you are a content website relying on SEO and Google Adsense you can be pretty confident Google will leave you alone. Until Twitter has a successful business model, they can’t have a consistent strategy and third parties should expect erratic behavior and even complete and sudden shifts in strategy.

So what might Twitter’s business model eventually be? I expect that Twitter search will monetize poorly because most searches on Twitter don’t have purchasing intent. Twitter’s move into mobile clients and hints about a more engaging website suggest they may be trying to mimic Facebook’s display ad model. (Facebook’s ad growth is being driven largely by companies like Zynga who are in turn monetizing users with social games and virtual goods. Hence it’s no surprise that a Twitter investor is suggesting that developers create social games instead of “filling holes” with URL shorteners etc.) Facebook’s model depends on owning “eyeballs,” which is entirely contradictory to the pure API model Twitter has promoted thus far. So if Twitter continues in this direction expect a lot of angst among third-party developers.

Hopefully Twitter “fills holes” through acquisitions instead of internal development. Twitter was a hugely clever invention and has grown its user base at a staggering rate, but on the product development front has been underwhelming. Buying Tweetie seemed to be a tacit acknowledgement of this weakness and an attempt to rectify it. Acquisitions also have the benefit of sending a positive signal to developers since least some of them are embraced and not just replaced.

What’s Facebook doing during all of this? Last year, Facebook seemed to be frantically copying Twitter – defaulting a lot of information to public, creating a canonical namespace, etc. Now that Twitter seems to be mimicing Facebook, Facebook’s best move is probably just to sit back and watch the Twitter ecosystem fight amongst itself. As Facebooker Ivan Kirigin tweeted yesterday: “I suppose when your competition is making huge mistakes, you should just stfu.”

Disclosure: As with everything I write, I have a ton of conflicts of interest, some of which are listed here.

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suyogmody

awesome! great to hear your thoughts!
it think @anywhere will provide an opportunity for revenue – details are scarce right now but it does seem to be going against the mantra of making twitter website a destination.

opportunity for twitter to be the “conversation platform” across all forms of the web is there – they can always make $ by charging from sites that inherently have people visiting with purchasing intent (ex. amazon)

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

I don't really understand what @anywhere is yet. Does anyone outside of twitter?

suyogmody

i think we'll find out @chirp!
freerobby

My take from Ev's demo at SXSWi was that it's a way to reduce friction in the funnel. It lets people sign up for Twitter and follow their favorite bloggers/companies without having to leave the blog/company web site.
http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

It's a twitter script/api similar to Facebook connect (afaik)

http://twitter.com/richardlusk Richard Lusk

This tweet from Dave McClure is priceless:

http://twitter.com/davemcclure/status/11916700179
http://www.ouvre-boite.com Julien

I agree wth most of what you said. However, there is one thing that matters to me and that nobody mentions.

The question is “who owns the user interaction?”. My bet is that those who owns the relationship win. I even bet this is exactly why Twitter is buying Tweetie. I don't have the last number of tweets published via a twitter owned property vs. a 3rd party app, but I think the vast majority is published via 3rd part apps. (Twitterfeed is even ahead of twitter.com!).

This means that currently the relationship is owned by 3rd party apps. Today they all push to Twitter. What if they decide to push to their own website? I'm http://twitter.com/julien51. I could very well http://tweetdeck.com/julien51 too or even http://seesmic.com/julien51 and these buckets would include my tweets from the corresponding app.

If these apps used a common protocol (I'd go for PubSubHubbub, or XMPP!), they could even “federate” much like email services, while still posting to twitter.com. At some point, they could even decide there is no need to post to twitter.com if all my friends (subscribers) are on any of the federated client-networks.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

That would be a smart and powerful response by 3rd parties. Twitter.com is has a minority share of Twitter traffic in US so now would be a good time to strike.

http://www.ouvre-boite.com Julien

Agreed. But it might be too late, as Twitter bought Tweetie, which is one of the “big” clients in terms of market-share. They're already taking back the “user-relationship”

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

True, and they could probably buy more “user relationships” market share back fairly cheaply (relative to Twitter's valuation that is).

http://azeemazhar.com/ azeemazhar

You would expect the twitter clients to do that, and for twitter to respond with stronger functionality on the client apps that may take time to make it into the public APIs or at least time for developers to make sense of them. (I mean Apple and MSFT have both adopted that approach).
Untilt he Tweetie acquisition I thought the reverse was going to happen” that twitter would simply say 'send me your homless, your wrwetches and any data you have', i.e. just encourage more apps to dump their updates into the twitter stream and then charge people access to different depths/RT/delay to that stream (which wd be aiming to aggregate every update in the world).

I also question whether Twitter clien

http://argylesocial.com/ Eric Boggs

Didn't StockTwits do this? Forked off of Twitter and built their own platform? I may be mistaken…

http://www.designftp.com genevate

Eric, you are correct, we (StockTwits) built our own platform, not only for our own business reasons but also because Twitter being a business itself would inevitably make it's foray into the third party ecosystem. It is really a smart business move when you think about it. Let the 3rd party eco-system develop and see what your users find valuable and snatch it up or create your own version of it.

Also Chris's post beings up the great point of realizing that most of the valuable users time is spent on 3rd party apps and those apps are where you can monetize Twitter.

http://uniquevisitor.net Jeff Pester

I think there are also a number of opportunities to own a relationship with Twitter users without offering a publishing capability at all. Off-Platform consumption & interaction applications, customized content delivery, and “channelization” functionality all have the potential to transform Twitter in to something much more valuable than it is today.

I've said before that Twitter is essentially plumbing. So rather than spending time adding more pipe, developers should be working on tools and utilities that create value at either end of the delivery capabilities of the pipe.
http://joybricks.com/blog/ vruz

I don't think many smart developers are angry.

Only early-friend developers making a lot of noise, wanting to keep their convenient privilege to themselves.
Certain early-friend developers have managed to get their tantrums out in the web 2.0 “media”.

It was so much nicer to them when they could just call @ev and hang out to throw in some features together.

That's understandable from their point of view, they took risks and invested money early, when Twitter was known mostly for its inclination towards marine mammals.
Those were the days!

As Chris correctly says, you'd have to be naive to pretend it was going to be like that forever.

freerobby

Another way to look at “who owns the user interaction?” is to examine how Twitter apps compare to Twitter.com at driving external traffic. Fred Wilson and John Borthwick estimate that the traffic they get from Twitter clients is 3-5 times what they get from Twitter.com. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/01/twittercom-vs-t…

I made a single serve site not too long ago that caught on virally (100k+ hits within 48 hours of launch), and my numbers suggest that traffic from Twitter clients was anywhere from 4.7-6.9 times what Twitter.com sent the site.
http://www.dlewis.net Dan Lewis

I have a few concerns w/this strategy for the apps:

1) A lot of the apps already syndicate to other networks, e.g. TweetDeck, Hootsuite, etc. all allow for posting to Facebook. But these apps are competitive. If any one of them creates a corresponding website for the app's updates, there's little reason to think the other ones would as well. The apps would have to actually federate, not just “federate” via common protocol.

2) Turning Twitter off as an option too early is deadly, while keeping it on for too long is self-defeating. Twitterfeed is easily duplicated by Twitter itself, I'd think, and if they ever shut off Twitter support, it'd mean either (a) Twitter was a carcass anyway or (b) a lot of syndicates would turn off the twitterfeeds. Where timing is everything and, per above, you have to act in concert with a lot of others with competing goals, you're basically doomed to fail.

3) A lot of apps push to Twitter (and Facebook) as a secondary action. Flickr isn't built to work like TwitPic, for example, but you certainly can push your pictures from Flickr to Twitter. At some point, the makers of these apps won't add additional “Share on” options.

http://www.ouvre-boite.com Julien

1) Posting to FB isn't enough. I don't care where it posts, I just want to read my friends's content. A lot of email providers agreed on a common protocol to send email outside of AOL! It's the whole smaller slice of a bigger pie thing

2) Obviously turning off Twitter will not happen tomorow. However the client may be able to add feature that are not in Twitter on a short term basis! More metadata… etc

3) That's the magic with PubSubHubbub, it dosn't need a “Share On” Button

http://www.dlewis.net Dan Lewis

We're each only one data point. Your “I don't care where it posts. I
just want to read my friends' content” while true, but the exact
opposite of my take. I'm very concerned where my status updates go –
I don't syndicate my Tweets to Facebook or Twitter, for example, and I
don't republish my Facebook updates on my blog. And I cannot stand it
when a friend posts everything everywhere.

While my preferences are, again, only one data point, I did a bit of
digging, comparing the interactions with my Facebook posts to a
friend's who republishes everything (tweets, flickr posts, foursquare
checkins, etc.). (See
http://dlewis.net/2010/02/20/tailoring-your-mes…
if you're so inclined.) During the same time period which I put up 10
posts, he put up somewhere in the 150-200 updates.

My ten posts: 25 public responses — that is, likes and comments.
Only one had no response at all.

His ~175: 17.

I'm not willing to conclude mine are more valuable, but it does seem
my (50% fewer) friends appreciates me more

http://twitter.com/mcuban Mark Cuban

The other issue is that Twitter is stateless. To go to the next level as a development platform that has to change.

Superfeedr.com and smashcode.com are making major strides , it will be interesting to see where Twitter takes it or allows it to go

M

http://twitter.com/Shawn_Butler Shawn_Butler

how exactly is Twitter “stateless”?

http://twitter.com/Shawn_Butler Shawn_Butler

thats called google wave.

http://www.ouvre-boite.com Julien

Wave is definetely a player here, indeed.

http://twitter.com/Shawn_Butler Shawn_Butler

i don't know what you mean by a player. The federated system you described has been implemented. It's called google wave and it has proved to be overly complex for users to adopt at any significant scale.

http://leftovertakeout.com gbattle

Like Julien, I've been pounding the desk for years for Twitter (or some competitor) to go XMPP and create a true real-time web, to no avail.

Build a simplified USENET on top of XMPP, with a bridge to Twitter as one of many destinations. Decentralized Protocol >> Centralized API. I'll state it again, PROTOCOL people.

I'm not sure why so many developers are angry.

1. There is still no restriction to outside innovation – no pay-to-play platform, no built in monetization hooks, no anti-competitive positioning at the API level.

2. Twitter has always had the buy (reward dev community innovation – Summize, Tweetie) vs. build (steal dev community innovation – UI rollover info, Retweet, Lists/Directories, URL wrappers for spam protection) option.

3. Twitter's goal is to hit the fat part of the curve in terms of feature set, hence, all they'll do is disintermediate those who compete for the middle.

4. What other exit would there have been for Tweetie? Loren + 1 would have run a nice cottage business earning cash. Only now do they have something more than this.

5. Don't get mad, get smart. Federate and build the real-time open version of SMTP. Lazy developers who think APIs are going to equalize the playing field are fooling themselves. SMTP, HTTP, XML, are all much, much more powerful and ubiquitous and eternal than Twitter or Facebook's API, and for good reason.

http://joybricks.com/blog/ vruz

I don't think many smart developers are angry.

Only early-friend developers making a lot of noise, wanting to keep their convenient privilege to themselves.
Certain early-friend developers have managed to get their tantrums out in the web 2.0 “media”.

It was so much nicer to them when they could just call @ev and hang out to throw in some features together.

That's understandable from their point of view, they took risks and invested money early, when Twitter was known mostly for its inclination towards marine mammals.
Those were the days!

As Chris correctly says, you'd have to be naive to pretend it was going to be like that forever.

http://dopeness.org Soren Macbeth

Some have already done this. See for example: http://stocktwits.com

freerobby

Your second paragraph really gets at the crux of it. It's not that Twitter doesn't have a right to do this stuff — it's their platform — it's that they pretended they were going to be different. They prodded developers along and even encouraged them to build the things that they are now calling “core functionality.”

The message I am taking home from Fred Wilson's post and the Tweetie acquisition is that if you are a Twitter developer and want to be “safe,” you have to build Twitter-integrated products instead of Twitter-centric ones. If your product couldn't exist without Twitter then you are part of its “core.”

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

I dunno. As we've seen in the past with MS, Google etc, the core normally gets bigger and bigger. Who thought 5 years ago Google would be building hardware (phones)?

http://benatlas.com/ Ben Atlas

Twitter is spending sugar daddy money on making a popular app free. Is there anything that could be more detrimental to the only model so far that made any money for the app developers?

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

I agree, although I don't think the charging for Twitter client model was particularly sustainable anyways.

http://benatlas.com/ Ben Atlas

The particulars of this market are debatable but consistent with my disdain for the advertising model everything that negates direct payment for products is the Internet poison and we all will pay for it eventually, if not at this very moment.

http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

A simple solution to this situation is opt in purchases that negate all ads through a particular portal. Ads aren't a requirement, revenue is.

http://twitter.com/mattsly Matt Sly

Indeed – I wonder what percentage of Twitter-related revenues Tweetie has represented up to this point? I'd guess a significant amount. Now iPhone apps have been commoditized.

http://benatlas.com/ Ben Atlas

This is an evil move by Twitter and it's investors. It's like MSFT killing Netscape with free IE.

http://lmframework.com/blog/about David Semeria

This all flows from the “first get users and then work out the business model” school of thought.

I think we can all see some eggs being broken in the future.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

The difference though is when, say, Google experimented with their business model they didn't have 50,000 apps dependent on them. Have we ever seen a case where a platform had so many 3rd party developers yet not business model? I'm not sure. Normally the developers come later since they are incented by revshare etc.

http://lmframework.com/blog/about David Semeria

Good point.

Revised: This all flows from the “first get users and developers, and then work out the business model” school of thought.
mweiksner

I beg to differ. Even before google adwords, nearly every emerging site was becoming dependent on organic traffic from google. So, more sites were dependent on google for their business than apps are dependent on twitter (prior and post google adwords).

http://twitter.com/mattsly Matt Sly

Creating well-documented, free-to-use APIs is really just a means of getting free R&D from the ecosystem, especially for a company still casting about for a business model.

Allow developers to tinker, see what works, and then either replicate or (for the lucky few: Summize, Tweetie) buys those companies.

It is certainly interesting to watch the ecosystem get a lesson in “supplier power 101.”
http://www.5o9inc.com/ Peter Cranstone

What's that old rule of thumb? Build a business model before you build a business plan. Twitter has enough cash to try 70+ business models. I have no idea what will succeed. They will attempt to control the platform, no surprise there. But will it turn into a meaningful and sustainable revenue model? Again no idea. From what I've learned about social networking the value is FROM it not IN it. So the model might appear out of left field so to speak. The carriers were much smarter that Twitter with SMS. They charged for it from day one. Imagine now if they hadn't. Can you imagine suddenly getting charged for sending a 160 characters?

IMO Twitter got to big too fast without a model. The expectations are so high that it's almost unobtainable, very much like FaceBook which has taken $3/4B in funding vs. Google's $20M.

Customers will pay for value. Twitters job is to show us that value and then set up a frictionless method to extract payment from us in return for that value. That's not a trivial problem.
http://twitter.com/jkaljundi jkaljundi

It has been always kind of stupid to assume that anyone can build a long-term business from building just different UI's (as in clients) on top of Twitter. That's what Twitter (and Facebook) must do themselves, provide the best web/mobile/tablet interface. But if customers want choice, the competing products can be successful even while competing with Twitter themselves.

This step by Twitter is good for their ecosystem: make app developers think, which unique products and services can be built on it.
http://twitter.com/shyamster Shyam Subramanyan

Not all Twitter apps are Twitter clients. Developers should focus on value added apps that are not simply Twitter clients. There's tremendous potential in this for both Twitter and the developers.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

True, but what non “hole fillers” have gotten a lot of traction and have plausible business models?

http://stevecheney.posterous.com/ steve cheney

CoTweet (bought by ExactTarget) and StockTwits
http://www.DefinitelySomething.com Jacob Shwirtz

I think what Shyam said is right on – not all Twitter apps are clients. Twitter should be offering the best “clients” themselves. The truly exciting part is the “non hole fillers” and that's where its still up for grabs, anyone's guess, and a lot of potential for creative people to make a splash. That should be the focus for hungry startups.

Modestly, that's what we're working on it with http://www.TweetBookz.com.
mweiksner

Lots of services use twitter as an integral part of their marketing that are not hole-filllers. UStream (with its social stream product) and Foursquare jump to mind.
http://twitter.com/shyamster Shyam Subramanyan

It will take time to evolve (what doesn't?). I basically view Twitter as a “communication bus” that can spawn many “upstream” apps – apps that help create interesting crowdsourced content (something more than a tweet), which can in turn be distributed via Twitter. Twitter needs content that is curated (constantly?) over its public time line.

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jeffreymcmanus

You said “complementary areas” when I think you meant the opposite, “overlapping areas”.

Obviously any platform provider can do this, but its developer ecosystem doesn't have to like it. The problem here is that Twitter's feature set is so narrow compared, say, to the feature set of operating system platforms like Windows or the Mac. This means there are far fewer dedicated applications that could possibly be built here.

There's a fantasy floating around that there are a million different types of Twitter applications out there just waiting to be built, and if developers would just knuckle down and innovate, they'd reveal themselves. I don't think this is true, though. More likely, after this week very few developers will risk building dedicated applications “for Twitter” and instead will start looking at Twitter as a feature of a bigger application.
http://benatlas.com/ Ben Atlas

Down on the on the Hacker News channel one can find the following comment:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1254478

“To be honest I don't see what is wrong with saving $2.99. In fact I think it would be silly to go spend $2.99 on Tweetie when you know it is going to be free soon.”

This comment is voted up 20 times, the highest on the thread. You can see that the cheerleading mob group think have completely taken over the Hacker News and it is especially sad because the presumed start up community is cheering the amputation of the very branch they are sitting on.

This Internet culture is in crisis.
http://portal.eqentia.com William Mougayar

You hit it on the head re: “mixed signals”. It’s been moving sands with Twitter and will probably be for a while longer until as you implied,- the lines of demarcations between users, developers, partners and competitors get clarified.

The big shift is that Twitter doesn’t want to be a one-trick API pony, whereas the API was the main entry point for innovation. They want to own eyeballs, direct end-user loyalty, and are getting geared up to monetize. If a company can’t monetize at 80 million users, as an investor, I'd be worried. 2010 is the year Twitter monetizes big time. I see them at ~$300 million revenue by end of 2010 (advertising driven mostly).

I’ve said it before. Twitter is 4 things: it’s 1) a network (social, information), 2) a medium (communications), 3) a marketplace (buying/selling), and 4) a platform (development).

Twitter has signalled they are becoming a big dog, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and they don’t want to be subservient to anyone. Their valuation is well above the $1 billion, headed into the $10 billion range.

ps- I disagree that Twitter would monetize search poorly. I think there's lots of room for innovation in “Twitter search”, and I don't think we can assume it will be like “Google search”. Why does search have to be associated with purchasing intent for it to monetize?

http://twitter.com/Shawn_Butler Shawn_Butler

>> I’ve said it before. Twitter is 4 things: it’s 1) a network (social, information), 2) a medium (communications), 3) a marketplace (buying/selling), and 4) a platform (development).
>>

1 No. when users have millions of followers it ceases to be a social network. it is mostly a random acyclic graph anymore. most connections convey no information social or otherwise.
2 No. twitter is not a medium. users communicate with twitter via web,sms,mobile networks. those are media. twitter is an endpoint.
3 No. you can neither buy nor sell anything on twitter. you can perhaps gain or lose reputation but that is a tenuous abstraction at best.
4. Correct. it is a platform for development with a public API and apparently if you pay enough a private one as well.

Choosing to build on that platform enhancing twitter's brand given its behavior as a “partner” is now questionable as a long term strategy

http://portal.eqentia.com William Mougayar

Well…
1- Eventually, users will be able to slice their social graph, but 99.9% of users don't have millions of followers. If you discover new people via Twitter, whether you have 1 or 1 million followers, then it's a social network.
2-It is a medium for passing information. I find it hard to not accept that one. That's the initial usage typically.
3-You can talk about your products/services, people find out about you and buy. Dell has already sold on Twitter. It's an emerging area, I admit.
4- Thanks for agreeing on this one . The part about whether it's beneficial or not is up to the developer. You, as a developer have to figure out how to make your use of the API more beneficial for you than it is for Twitter.

http://twitter.com/L1AD LIAD

concur with you completely. until twitters monetization plan is known developers are in an increasingly precarious position.

now that twitter is anointing official apps, blackberry and iphone so far, (desktop client and ipad to come?) – its puts twitter inc and the twitter ecosystem on a direct collision course.

Dave Winer summed it up nicely earlier when he said that applications on twitters natural evolutionary path are likely to get rolled-over.

Twitter have leveraged the ecosystem as a costless innovation and R & D facility. (just likes Apple is doing with the appstore)

Announcements at Chirp will be interesting.
http://twitter.com/Shawn_Butler Shawn_Butler

1 Not to be all sour grapes but where is this innovation at an all time high you refer to? seriously, an example or two. I don't see it. Just more rehashing of existing work and a lot of yelling at the top of people's lungs to get attention.

2 I imagine most of the people who are commenting about silly 3rd party developers having a “bad business model” etc are not developers. Definitely not developers who invested significant time to creating code that made the twitter platform so popular by making it universally available. Creating something and just blathering on about it pretending you do are two entirely different things.

if you are going to have an open api and invite, no profit, off the work of others, respect that relationship with honesty. Take foursquare. They were upfront about their plans to develop/acquire inhouse clients so devs have focussed energies on ways to interact/improve the api in different ways.

@anywhere is just a javascript “widget” to embed twitter api features. thats it. There is a reason everyone was bored by ev at sxswi and it wasn't just because he is an arrogant ass.

The commenter who wrote that twitter said they were going to be different and lied is correct. Apple is doing the same thing. It's just that consumers are too stupid to care now especially by experiences they get or think they get for free and it's a race to the bottom to support that addiction.

it's apparently easy for social media douchebags / marketers / seo consultants or whatever you people call yourselves now to fool someone into paying your salary without any justification of ROI whatsoever. Engineers do not have that luxury. We live and eat by what we produce, so lying to us hurts more than you know.
http://twitter.com/Shawn_Butler Shawn_Butler

thats called google wave.
http://www.ouvre-boite.com Julien

Wave is definetely a player here, indeed.
http://www.thenetworkgarden.com hypermark

Twitter's screw-up, if it can be characterized as such, is poorly communicating its intentions, roadmap and business strategy before pursuing this path.

After all, developers are intelligent enough to understand that when they bet on a platform there is always risk that the platform won't take off, scale or evolve the way that they expect. And of course, they get that there is risk that their innovation gets co-opted by the platform creator.

This paradox is manageable when the ecosystem perceives the platform creator as “having their back” and clearly communicating their directional intentions far enough in advance of acting upon them.

Conversely, when developers perceive the platform creator as simply skimming the cream, that's a recipe for no developer building differentiated offerings on top of the platform moving forward (as opposed to lightweight features, like auto-posting).

Either way, the bloom is off the rose a bit, and it will be interesting to see how Twitter communicates the net-net on the Tweetie outcome, and what protocols they establish for giving partners a clearer delineation point moving forward.

Mark

http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

What I find interesting is that even with an official twitter app like Tweetie or whatever the official brand name will be, we still may gravitate to alternative interface tools that connect various services like Tweetdeck and Seesmic.

Great comment Mark.

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http://twitter.com/JoeDuck Joe Hunkins

Great insights here Chris. Twitter is remarkable but needs to make money, and their journey to that end will be fascinating. Some will get rich, some will perish, and that's a good thing.

http://www.bestmusicever.net/ Aphrica

I've always wondered about Twitter's business plan myself..
Such great potential, but it seems to be going to waste.

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http://www.vision4standards.com/ Sylvia

Great writeup.
Why is everyone making the assumption that no one wants the freedom and independence that third-party apps provide? I don't care how many features are added to twitter.com, I prefer to use my own software on my own hardware and not web based services.

Cloud Computing, SAAS, and web-based apps are nothing more than what used to be called timeshare computing. This was before the days of PCs.

Even if it costs me money, I like my own software on my own equipment!
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http://chrisdrit.posterous.com/ ChrisDrit

“This week Twitter finally started acting like what it is: a well-financed company run by smart capitalist”

Interesting how we saw this with Google, back in the day, as well…
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http://www.elieseidman.com Elie Seidman

Well said. Twitter can't/does not make money, and has raised $160M of capital. What do the folks – who also don't make much/any money – who are developing for the Twitter platform think is going to happen to them? Like you said, until Twitter goes from Internet charity to actual business, their behavior is going to be that of a business increasingly – and perhaps more desperately – seeking a way to make money which is to say that they will be erratic at best and will do whatever they need to do. Getting rid of their dependence on Twitter seems like smart and needed offense for the 3rd parties. No one owns email, why should we accept that someone should own short portable messages.
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Aviah Laor

“Free” is just a (valuable) competitive advantage of VC backed companies and rich companies. While every business might start with free, VC backed players can scale free and leave the pack in the dust.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if twitter just charge $30 per account per year and call it a day.

http://technbiz.blogspot.com paramendra

That will be the end of Twitter.
http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

There will be wonderful services that scale with pure content based on fees. $30 is too high for something like twitter though, since it's primary services can be replicated on distributed web software (for free or through very cheap remote hosting/open source hubs). Something like a few dollars per customer per account would be fantastic to start out. Look at what Facebook games can net.

Aviah Laor

probably, but for somebody who monetize twitter or doing PR, announcement etc may be willing to pay a little more.

http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

Agreed

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http://technbiz.blogspot.com paramendra

It can't be all buy or all build. http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2010/04/twitter-do… Why did you ever doubt what Twitter's business model was going to be? It was always going to be ads, just like for Google, just like for Facebook.
http://technbiz.blogspot.com paramendra

Chris Dixon On Twitter: Not Impressive http://goo.gl/fb/Bx435
Art Felgate

Twitter so far seems to be ignoring Machine-to-Machine applications such as Telemetry which could be revolutionized by Twitter-like follower links. Ken Camp @kencamp is the thought leader on this, and recently wrote some more:

http://stardustglobalventures.com/2010/04/11/tr…
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Chris Dixon