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Twitter is a tragic tale

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Re: Twitter is a tragic tale

#2
I know this has been mentioned before, but Twitter should just charge for access to their API. They are really squandering opportunities, and I hope they will take a look in a new direction. Perhaps they could take a page from LinkedIn as well, and offer premium accounts where they save every tweet.

Personally, I think Twitter Ads are useless. For the price, I would have a hard time imagining that marketers would not get a better return out of Adsense or FB Ads.

Re: Twitter is a tragic tale

#3
As for IBM, its market cap is quite close to Microsoft, so I think they did reasonably well (they could have done even better if they've bet on software earlier, but that doesn't mean they should necessarily "bet outside their walls"). Also, the fact that they invested everything they had on an "open" platform (the PC architecture) is kind of an agreement to what you said they should have done... No?

As for Twitter, I find it funny that people see it as such a revolution. I mean, it's just a little social network with a very limited scope and features... I don't jmagine it revolutionizing more than it already does (it's a great outlet for the media, celebrities and breaking news, but I don't think it's sooo much more)... Or is it? :)

Re: Twitter is a tragic tale

#5
post #2

I know this has been mentioned before, but Twitter should just charge for access to their API. They are really squandering opportunities, and I hope they will take a look in a new direction. Perhaps they could take a page from LinkedIn as well, and offer premium accounts where they save every tweet. Personally, I think Twitter Ads are useless. For the price, I would have a hard time imagining that marketers would not…

Wouldn't that be the fastest way to kill any innovation at once? Paid APIs aren't exactly the most popular thing out there (specially on consumer sites), and I don't think enough people would pay for it/represent a sizeable chunk of profit...

Re: Twitter is a tragic tale

#6
post #2

I know this has been mentioned before, but Twitter should just charge for access to their API. They are really squandering opportunities, and I hope they will take a look in a new direction. Perhaps they could take a page from LinkedIn as well, and offer premium accounts where they save every tweet. Personally, I think Twitter Ads are useless. For the price, I would have a hard time imagining that marketers would not…

(I clicked to downvote your comment by accident, while trying to upvote it. So sorry, my stubby fingers don't work well with small icons on an ipad :( )

Re: Twitter is a tragic tale

#7
An additional tragedy not mentioned is the broken circle of trust between developers, users, and service providers.

In the future, developers will be more skeptical of promising platforms, and users will be less willing to turn over their content and data to platforms that may only temporarily in a state of free and openness.

On the bright side, this may lead to more explicit, contractual openness for commercial platforms or the stronger emergence of completely open platforms as users and developers learn the lesson that it matters.

Social startups might take this to heart - as Google and others already have. Users and developers may well start to pay attention to that buried EULA and its back-out provisions designed to make sure you can assure investors that betraying your base for cash will always be a possibility.

Re: Twitter is a tragic tale

#8
I wonder why Twitter has never tried to do anything interesting with all the data they own. I can think of so many ways they can mine useful data from them (think of brand sentiment analysis). Or - how about exposing metrics like views, clicks etc. to businesses in a Pro account?

Re: Twitter is a tragic tale

#9
post #2

I know this has been mentioned before, but Twitter should just charge for access to their API. They are really squandering opportunities, and I hope they will take a look in a new direction. Perhaps they could take a page from LinkedIn as well, and offer premium accounts where they save every tweet. Personally, I think Twitter Ads are useless. For the price, I would have a hard time imagining that marketers would not…

Twitter does charge for it's APIs for large users of it. See DataSift and GNip.

Re: Twitter is a tragic tale

#10
post #5
post #2

I know this has been mentioned before, but Twitter should just charge for access to their API. They are really squandering opportunities, and I hope they will take a look in a new direction. Perhaps they could take a page from LinkedIn as well, and offer premium accounts where they save every tweet. Personally, I think Twitter Ads are useless. For the price, I would have a hard time imagining that marketers would not…

Wouldn't that be the fastest way to kill any innovation at once? Paid APIs aren't exactly the most popular thing out there (specially on consumer sites), and I don't think enough people would pay for it/represent a sizeable chunk of profit...

I am just trying to provide alternatives. I have no idea what twitters revenues are. Perhaps a tiered system like mailchimp has? If you have under a certain amount of requests it would be free. Paid applications which heavily use the API could be charged more.

Also, as I mentioned in my comment above, I think a premium subscription would be in order. I would pay for a service that saves tweets, and provided basic analytics. I am just trying to get the conversation going about alternatives. If anyone else has possible revenue alternatives for Twitter, I'd be interested to hear them.

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