Let's hope that the selling-out of Twitter will give a nudge to its open decentralized competitors... I'm not holding my breath, but who knows ? I still dream of an XMPP Twitter...
Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
71–80 of 122 posts
Re: Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
#72I'm actually impressed they found a way to monetize their platform that doesn't involve obtrusive ads. This seems like a good source of income for them and their clients, and as long as they don't force you to follow commercial accounts, it will be almost invisible to anyone who doesn't want to see it. I'm cautiously optimistic.
One use case I can think of that might be suited to real time updates/shopping would be when a football/soccer team releases a new season shirt. I follow the EPL, there's always a huge fuss in the media when the big teams release their new shirt (not sure if this applies to American sports), if the images broke first on Twitter it could be a good source of sales.
The downside is that it would be quite one-off, the interest would die quickly.
Re: Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to guess you don't use the 'one-click buy' button on Amazon either?
Amazon has an established reputation as a low-priced retailer, and stakes its reputation on that. Twitter seems to intend this as more of an ease-of-purchase kind of feature. My expectation is that there is little to no incentive for Twitter to be pricing these products competitively.
Not everyone comparison shops for all products. Many people are happy paying a standard price for certain goods, without hesitation. For example, expecting to pay $10-15 for a t-shirt is common, as is paying $1 for a song. For these sorts of purchases, reducing the friction from discovery to purchase is pretty important. Suffice to say, I probably wont buy a car or a vacuum cleaner on Twitter.
Re: Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
#74Re: Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
#75See Chirpify[1], who has since pivoted. I don't know if that pivot was because of the idea or because Twitter decided it made more sense to be an ad wall than a platform. I really, truly do not understand Twitter's thinking. I'm sure on someone's spreadsheet of imaginary numbers it looks more attractive to be a billboard, but Twitter had the opportunity to be a true platform. A platform gives you control. It's a long…
This is a little bit too hand-wavy to me. You mention only a single opportunity Twitter missed by not focusing on being a "true platform", and then you immediately hedge by saying that you're not sure people will actually use it.
Sandy comes to mind, and is actually a better example. (Although Google seems to have forgotten it existed.)
For clarity, I see Twitter as having this amazing potential as a message bus for both people, apps, and services. And I feel that potential has been squandered.
I'm unsure if this particular idea is going to pay off. But the general notion of an ecosystem of services hanging off of Twitter seems like the right one to me.
(This is usually where someone says app.net, and I say 'critical mass'.)
Re: Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter isn't a protocol. If it was, there'd be Twitter (the protocol) based services everywhere, and it'd be open and federated. Twitter is a service. Services need money. It's a simple as that.
Thing is, Twitter should be a protocol. It clearly fills an existing need (I see it as very similar to email in that regard, just filling a different need – people want to chat publicly with each other and in a very informal way inform the public about things), but it doesn’t really make sense as a service that wants to make money. Twitter should be just like email, not this one monopoly controlling everything. It’s…
I feel exactly the same about Facebook. There should be a protocol for social networks and should be federated with no one controlling everything, similar to email.
If fact, I believe it will go this way at some point in the future, despite how impregnable Facebook seems now. At one point Bebo and MySpace seemed unassailable too.
Re: Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
#77Let's hope that the selling-out of Twitter will give a nudge to its open decentralized competitors... I'm not holding my breath, but who knows ? I still dream of an XMPP Twitter...
I don't think that Twitter's effort to monetize is directly equal to selling out. If the service's quality degrades significantly (too many pushy ads and buy buttons) then, I'd say it sold out. So far, I've found the ads fairly relevant and not too frequent.
Re: Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
#78Let's hope that the selling-out of Twitter will give a nudge to its open decentralized competitors... I'm not holding my breath, but who knows ? I still dream of an XMPP Twitter...
I don't think that Twitter's effort to monetize is directly equal to selling out. If the service's quality degrades significantly (too many pushy ads and buy buttons) then, I'd say it sold out. So far, I've found the ads fairly relevant and not too frequent.
I may be oversensitive to spam (I must admit that my love of ad-blocking software in all sorts of systems borders on mania) but the very idea that I now have to be wary of Sponsored Tweets that require an effort to unsee has already started to spoil the experience.
Re: Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
#79Any app/website with a large user base should probably add this feature. The main value here, compared to simply dropping an ecommerce link in a tweet (the current use case), is piggy backing payment and fulfillment on top of the existing twitter user account.
Re: Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
#80I can see this being useful, and welcome it. Particularly for music downloads a la iTunes etc.