There’s something about Twitter‘s recent decisions that just doesn’t make any sense to me at the moment.
It’s experiencing huge growth and celebrity adoption, it’s appearing in mainstream media (Even The Sun is carrying stories about Twitter), and it has some money in the bank.
But one of the big advantages of the Twitter model is that it can use the huge advantage of external developers and applications undertaking the risky part of establishing themselves before acquiring them or introducing something similar.
After all, Twitter acquired Summize to become Twitter Search.
But since then, things have been a little different. First Twitter acquired Values of n, the company behind Stikkit and I Want Sandy, with Rael Dornfest joining Twitter’s user experience group – and the former services being shut, which caused some outcry, and a group of developers to come together to create an open source version of Sandy.
Recently Twitter introduced a ‘suggested users‘ page for new registrations and alongside the options to find other members. Which seemed like a reasonable idea to encourage new users to start following and interacting with other members.
Sadly it’s rubbish. For two reasons.
- There’s no relevancy. It’s offered to new users before they have filled in profile details or sent any messages, meaning thatthe suggestions have no context, and are pretty much useless. And although many people have said this could be the start of monetisation, how much money do irrelevant friend suggestions make?
- There are far better options out there already. For new users with no context, why not simply let people take a look at relevant categories on Twitter user directory Twellow? And if you’re looking for relevant suggestions for people to follow, there’s already the totally awesome MrTweet. (Interview here)
And now there’s concern over the decision to limit API calls from applications. I’m not aware of how many calls are average, so take a look at Jesse Stay’s thoughts on the SocialToo blog, Mark Evans at Twitterati, or SocialToo advisor Louis Gray (Who very kindly recommended and linked to 140char today!)
The idea from Twitter’s perspective is to ensure reliability – which is certainly understandable giving the problems that sometimes occur – and the only services that aren’t viable any longer are those which notify you of people unfollowing, such as Qwitter (no longer with us) . But as Marshall Kirkpatrick writes at ReadWriteWeb, Twitter applications are developing incredibly fast and this could hurt anyone trying to offer something radically new. And as Rafe Needleman points out at Cnet, it seems very odd that Twitter hasn’t used this chance to partner with external developers.
On the bright side, the API limit should force more efficient use of the Twitter API, which will benefit everyone, and the Twitter Firehose and OAuth support are due within around a month.
Hopefully that will mean Twitter can stop worrying about the scalability and learn to love external applications again. Especially as they’re building financial models (e.g. Twittad and Magpie), and monetisable services (e.g. Stocktwit) which show where the cash is for Twitter without the internal team having to experiment at all.