Your sarcastic grunting aside, it's utterly shocking. Imagine Google, circa 2001, with crass, interstitial banner ads between search and SERP. It would have destroyed them. The opportunity for heaps and heaps of money, gone in a single, vulgar puff of smoke.
Twitter has the opportunity to leverage a critical mass of enthusiastic users. This is a rare, golden gift.
Last time this happened, Facebook minted some billionaires while discovering a sustainable, user-virtuous business model. There were growing pains, especially with the early, spammy apps, but overall, Facebook has managed to balance the needs of a lot of people without screwing up the magic of their product.
The time before that, Google did the same thing.
Sadly, rather than pushing toward a business model that makes the most of the very impressive ecosystem they've cultivated, it looks as though they want to break down the most interesting portions of it and then find money in whatever turns out on the other side.
The lasting virtue of Twitter, to me, always seemed to be that it would always be whatever any given user needed it to be, thanks to the wealth of apps that dip into its API. If that goes away, Twitter's shelf life is curtailed.
To me, it seems nutty, and not terribly imaginative. Ask Digg: pissing off your core constituency so you can hopefully make money is not the same as actually making money.
pissing off your core constituency so you can hopefully make money is not the same as actually making money.
So, after all this ranting about Twitter's change - what do you suggest they do to "actually make money?" Isn't that the end-game for every company? Is twitter even close to justifying their private valuations with revenue? I haven't seen anything from you that suggests an alternative approach that actually makes them more money, other than "don't do that."
You also previously mentioned that twitter has a rare golden gift of leveraging a critical mass of enthusiastic users.
My thoughts about that? Show me the money! So far, they aren't doing that.
Easy, have normal accounts for personal and non profit use, anyone that is trying to either sell things or building a brand can pay for access, including all the celebrities.
I don't mind the current promoted trends/tweets/follows, I guess the only thing I would change is call the promoted trend something else, because it isn't really a trend.
This makes no sense. How is it in any way tractable for Twitter to bucket a user into a brand, a person, a person who is also a brand, a person who is trying to build a brand, a person who is just really enthusiastic about a product, or a astroturf account pretending to be really enthusiastic about a product?
It's not. That's not easy, that's a fundamentally realignment of the product.
What if you're a normal guy and you get famous from some youtube video? Now you're a celebrity. Pay up - but oops, you're broke? Fuck it, you're off Twitter.
Okay make it simpler, your posting as directly as a for profit company and not under your own name you pay, doesn't have to be a large amount. I think it's better model than advertising, if your reaching a customer base through the service and see value in it for your business you pay. I personally like it a lot better than ads.
They could offer premium accounts with new services like analytics, search ads like google does, charge brands for an analytics tool showing anyone talking about their products, etc.
Wait, the Twitter engineering team should build something separate from Twitter? I don't understand.
On a similar note, though, I am surprised that this hasn't sparked more discussion about the distributed open source social networking movements. I know Dave Winer's been talking about quitting Twitter working on some sort of alternative. There seem to be some interesting answers to Facebook that could orthogonally solve similar problems to the ones Twitter does. Anyone know of any other interesting work along these lines?
Why yes it is. Twitter went out of their way to say how much they supported developers and considered them key to their success. That wouldn't seem to include making Titan off limits.
Uh, yeah. Is that really surprising? We're all being driven to Monetization Gulch to escape the absolutely fatal Winter of Unprofitability.