I’ve been watching the developments at Twitter over the past 2 months with some real interest. Other than the excellent engineering feats they accomplish, like Gizzard, elephant-bird and their work with Unicorn, they’ve made some interesting business decisions.
I’m specifically talking about their stance announced in February that they will start competing in the application space. On Friday, they attacked the app space by acquiring Tweetie and launching their own blackberry app. So in a day, they’ve launched a salvo at two of the most popular app markets in business. My only surprise was that they didn’t launch a desktop or AIR app the same day. I’d guess their only reason not to is because they prefer to use their site as the main “app” instead.
Loic Le Meur, the founder of Seesmic, has an interesting take on it. Admittedly he takes it very well, for hole read niche:
As long as we keep moving and innovating and both partners treat each other in a fair way, I think we will all be safe, the hole is big enough and there are many other holes.
Where Seesmic has gone right is that it’s not only working on Twitter, they work with Facebook, and other socnets too. But lets face it, as long as you’re no the owner of the platform you’re always going to be at the mercy of the owners, now you’re just at the mercy of more of them.
I remember an argument years ago about how the Internet was turning into the sharecropping system of the time. That was then in reference to GeoCities, but it seems just as applicable these days.
And as I’ve experience in the past, the most fickle of mistresses is Google. In one case they put a penalty in place that killed 80% of traffic overnight. Loic, in the same post above, points out that this happened to a friend “because they did not like what he was doing”.
Google have moved into real-estate, shopping, Airline times and stock quotes. The real scary thing is of course that they’re not making any significant amount of money from any of these efforts, they’re all just AdSense fodder. Twitter isn’t making money on its apps either, at least not as far as I know. As a business operating in a space, how can you compete with someone willing to occupy that space without having to face your business realities?
Simple answer is you can’t. It’s not enough anymore to be the best client to a platform, maybe it never was, you have to solve a problem. If you’re just a better UI on top of Twitter, you haven’t solved a problem, you’ve made their solution prettier or more usable, which is great if you’re an UX guy for them, weak if you’re building a business on it.
If you’ve built up a directory site that only serves to aggregate information already on the web, you’re not solving a problem. Even if you add value through adding additional editorial content or control you’re not really solving a problem you’re putting a layer on top of an existing solution if they’re using Google to find you, and those layers can be taken away by the owners of the existing solution at their discretion, regardless of what you’ve done.
Of course, the platforms and solutions only became popular because they’re useful. And they became useful through being open to an extent. Twitter would not have become as popular as it is now if it only had its web and SMS client. It certainly would’ve had major competition on platforms like the iPhone if it didn’t open itself to developers. Google wouldn’t have become popular if it didn’t educate and empower webmasters and content aggregators. The entire SEO industry is based on trying to pretend you know what Google wants, and for an SEO’s mojo to work they’ll encourage even tighter adherence to whatever the current Google magic bullet is.
Both are competing with their original enthusiasts, biting the hand that fed them growing up.
In 2006 all of the company results on Google maps were from yell.com, a couple of years later, they’ve built the local business centre, and completely replaced the yell content with in-house results. A local business site in that period received a 90% drop in yell.com referrals but had an overall increase of traffic from Google. They will defend themselves, correctly, that they are serving both the search user and the business customer better by doing what they’ve done. That doesn’t change that yell is now defunct, that it sucks as a site and a business may also play a role of course.
When a retail wholesaler sells direct to the public, bypassing the retail channels, it has to tread carefully, it incentivises retailers to still stock the product through giving them a fair margin, promotional offers, training, etc. The online platforms have to be careful that they don’t alienate the businesses out there that make them tick.
I hope that the fall out from all this is that developers wake up, and don’t just chase the dream on the new platform, but ensure that they protect themselves by working with, or demanding, platforms that respects them as developers and continues to give them that respect and support to let them build stable businesses.
I also hope that business realise you have to have something worth using, something worth paying for, otherwise you are just a means to an end. Which can be more easily replaced that how you did it in the first place.
I fear though that the excitement of the next big thing causes people to leap in before making sure they’re not going to get screwed over. I must say though, the only people that stand to lose from a move like this are the people that have gained through the platform already. To the rest of us it just means more choice.
