For all five of Twitter-GAF...
These couple of articles over the last day or so seem linked. I get the impression Twitter investors have been getting impatient for signs of a business model at the company, and the result is maybe less than people might have hoped.
In a potentially 'not very nice' move, Twitter has seemingly got the ball rolling on building out 'official' Twitter versions of certain apps (for starters, their own version of Ubertwitter, the Blackberry app). Fueling suspicions about their motives is a blog post from one of Twitter's investors talking about the great business opportunities in apps, and how the time for third party apps that simply plug holes in Twitter has come and gone.
I always wondered how Twitter felt seeing some app providers build revenue and proper business models around their apps while Twitter itself still hadn't - it seemed like perhaps the money is to be made in these apps and not so much in the plumbing (Twitter), and Twitter is slowly waking up to that?
Needless to say, third parties aren't very happy. Devs are starting to wonder if their app might be 'next' to have an official Twitter competitor. No one wants to build something, build a new idea and have it gain traction - i.e. do all the hard work - for Twitter to usurp them with a built-in or official version.
Is a Twitter Developer Revolt Brewing?
Then on the heels of that is this news, that Twitter is to start embedding advertising in search results and also in user feeds, in the form of 'promoted tweets'. Advertising is something Twitter's founders have been notably unenthusiastic about in the past, so it's interesting to see this about-turn.
Twitter to Start Rolling Out Advertising
Did someone splash some cold water on Twitter? In the way they had been taking so much time to work out how they were going to build revenue I kind of hoped they'd come up with something bold and new that might offer new directions for other online services also, but it seems they're just resorting to the same things everyone else does and/or piggybacking on opportunities built by third parties as they emerge. That's a bit disappointing.
These couple of articles over the last day or so seem linked. I get the impression Twitter investors have been getting impatient for signs of a business model at the company, and the result is maybe less than people might have hoped.
In a potentially 'not very nice' move, Twitter has seemingly got the ball rolling on building out 'official' Twitter versions of certain apps (for starters, their own version of Ubertwitter, the Blackberry app). Fueling suspicions about their motives is a blog post from one of Twitter's investors talking about the great business opportunities in apps, and how the time for third party apps that simply plug holes in Twitter has come and gone.
I always wondered how Twitter felt seeing some app providers build revenue and proper business models around their apps while Twitter itself still hadn't - it seemed like perhaps the money is to be made in these apps and not so much in the plumbing (Twitter), and Twitter is slowly waking up to that?
Needless to say, third parties aren't very happy. Devs are starting to wonder if their app might be 'next' to have an official Twitter competitor. No one wants to build something, build a new idea and have it gain traction - i.e. do all the hard work - for Twitter to usurp them with a built-in or official version.
Is a Twitter Developer Revolt Brewing?
Then on the heels of that is this news, that Twitter is to start embedding advertising in search results and also in user feeds, in the form of 'promoted tweets'. Advertising is something Twitter's founders have been notably unenthusiastic about in the past, so it's interesting to see this about-turn.
Twitter to Start Rolling Out Advertising
Did someone splash some cold water on Twitter? In the way they had been taking so much time to work out how they were going to build revenue I kind of hoped they'd come up with something bold and new that might offer new directions for other online services also, but it seems they're just resorting to the same things everyone else does and/or piggybacking on opportunities built by third parties as they emerge. That's a bit disappointing.
