∞ Twitter Needs New Leadership
A very good read on what Twitter should do instead:
Specifically, Twitter should dramatically increase the number of applications — and thus the number of potential reasons — a potential user might create and maintain an active user account. For example, Twitter could follow the Facebook strategy and build out a family of apps — one for messaging, another for news, others for specific events — and enhance the ways one could interact with Twitter content, whether that be through comments, private communities, etc. It’s ok that this is aping Facebook; what differentiates social networks is not their feature set but rather their organizing principle. Facebook is about people you know, and Twitter about those that share your interests. Everything else — including all the quixotic features that Twitter holds dear — are implementation details.3
Alternatively, Twitter could empower third-party developers to build these sorts of applications that feed back information into the Twitter interest graph. An application like Nuzzel, for example, which uses your Twitter graph to create a news app, has much more of a one-way relationship with the social network: Nuzzel is getting all the benefit, and not sending much information back to Twitter. Twitter would be better off retooling their API and developer agreements to ensure they are learning from every application they interact with, and in return sharing their graph along with advertising in the form of their MoPub or Namo Media-derived offerings. The advantage of this approach is that the imagination and ingenuity of a massive developer ecosystem will always be far faster and more innovative than anything any one company can do on its own — just ask Apple.
As an aside, something that has hurt Twitter on the public markets has been the expectation/hope that the social network would follow Facebook’s path with regards to user numbers and monetization. Clearly the company as presently constructed isn’t anything close to that; however, the open approach that I’m advocating could in fact become something exponentially larger. Last week I wrote about Facebook’s AOL-like dominance and concluded, “What might be the broadband to Facebook’s dial-up?” The answer, I think, is this open Twitter: an identity system for the rest of the web that connects people and apps according to interests, not just superficial relationships, and monetizes accordingly.