In case you missed it, Twitter recently updated their Terms of Service, asking developers (effectively) not to build any more Twitter clients. Now that they have their own apps, they don’t want developers to compete with them. This announcement was followed, of course, by the expected uproar.
The whole situation highlights several interesting issues.
First, platform companies are always looking at emerging compliments for growth. Ecosystems are great experimental “test tubes” for the platforms, and ecosystem developers always run the risk of being subsumed.
But this highlights a much deeper issue, unique to Twitter. In spite of phenomenal usage growth, Twitter’s still struggling with monetization. The real problem is that they’re stuck in utility-level value. They’re much like AOL’s Instant Messenger: widely used, but beyond display ads embedded in the Windows client, a very very tough app to make any money from.
Given this, I’m not surprised to see them attempting to take more control — they don’t have any choice.
I like the AIM analogy, in fact, “hey it’s sort of like broadcast instant messenger” was my first reaction to Twitter. But I think that observation also highlights where the analogy breaks down a bit (and where some paths to monetization may lie).
Because Twitter is broadcast, there are more marketing uses of the platform that are therefore monetizable, perhaps tools for marketers or monetization of endorsements (ala FB “likes”). Because Twitter is more message-oriented, contextual advertising or injected messages have more of a place than they would in an IM client. And because Twitter induces more propagation (RTs) and conversation (@ replies) they may have more easily connected and therefore analyzable data sets that could monetized as secondary data.
i wish i could say more but this isn’t the case Andy.
Bijan: Totally understand! Thanks for jumping in.