Comments on: Hey, Twitter — shouldn’t it be about the users?

By: Donna Marie Johnson ™, Founder of The GGene S.I.S. ™ Journal

Donna Marie Johnson ™, Founder of The GGene S.I.S. ™ Journal — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 19:11:19 +0000

Glad that I read this. I totally agree that without apps, like hootsuite, which meet other needs that twitter does not, I probably wouldn’t use twitter nearly as much. It will be interesting to keep watching how things unfold here.

By: Wes Keene

Wes Keene — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:30:47 +0000

Thank you. I’ve been wondering this very same thing.

By: Brad

Brad — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 18:48:21 +0000

Mathew, good read, but as a third party developer of a funded startup that has yet to release our -amazing- product, I too am focussed on the users.

What Twitter is doing is stifling innovation that could benefit users down the road. Who wants to build a new, creative, amazing app knowing they will be capped at 100k users?

In the end, it is the users who suffer by never realizing the potential of innovations that never were created.

By: Kleemi

Kleemi — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 10:05:03 +0000

Twitter is a traditional “Company” and this means that their intrest are and will always be aligned with investors and other “traditional” Companies” that provide the possibility of revenue or further investment. Twitters has no writ or will to do any thing that will benefit the twitter “Community” or the “Public” at large.

As a traditional internet “Company” Twitters goal is not build on top of existing “Open” standards “Companies” like Twitter generate large amounts of revenues by creating frameworks of scarcity; the idea that the “Company” is the only owner of X, or that X is in limited supply. Twitter creates frameworks of scarcity around its services and api.

This is their core revenue model and as such they will seek to create a dependence on a “one of a kind” offering that excludes any input from the very “Community” that gives value to the “Twitter” “API.

Without the content and data created by the “Community” the API that twitter uses to generate revenues and value would be worthless….. Interesting that the framework of ownership when it concerns community generated content has been so skewed and spun that we now think it is perfectly acceptable to allow a “Company” to create a TOS for access to content that they do not own…

By: Thomas Krafft

Thomas Krafft — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 01:57:26 +0000

I don’t know why Twitter doesn’t just open up everything and simply embed paid and promoted items in the streams they make freely available. Their TOC could be reduced to one simple requirement that other clients and users cannot remove ads from the streams (and/or require other apps display x number of Twitter ads per nnn number of Tweets). Twitter would get more impressions and users, along with greater monetization of their streams. Seems like a win win to me. Twitter could embrace the innovation happening around it, and support the ecosystem it helped create, while growing revenues they want. But maybe I’m not as smart as their executive team…

By: Rob W

Rob W — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 20:34:01 +0000

If apple or investers don’t keep feeding twitter, (which as understand it is loosing 400k yearly) then we wouldn’t be having this discussion on the new monetization of twitter – it would have folded by now…

By: Karen Kazaryan

Karen Kazaryan — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 20:20:23 +0000

One thing that lot’s of bloggers are missing when say that only minority are using third party clients. So do only minority are actually post something. Twitter is not even close to 80/20. And without power users Twitter becomes glorified RSS.

By: Christopher Logan Cain

Christopher Logan Cain — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 19:12:03 +0000

Everyone was saying “oh, why would we want App.net if it’s just like Twitter?!” Well, Twitter saw how hard of a time App.net was going to have and lended them a hand. Good on you, Twitter.

Competitor etiquette.
Super simple stuff.

By: John C Abell

John C Abell — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 18:35:42 +0000

Here’s another company which, like Facebook, has raised too much and is now in a bind to come up with a business plan that justifies its valuation and obligations to early investors.

Twitter can certainly try to become a destination, but that’s not why anybody uses it. This tack is like reverting to the days when there was a single telephone in the living room, next to a lovely seat. Comfortable, sure. Phone still works just fine. But …