Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/did-twitter-just-deliver-third-party-apps-a-death-blow.php

by jdp23 • 14 years ago

118 46 14 years ago

idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com

Maybe there's a trend here, but maybe its just me being short-sighted. I'll type out what I'm thinking.

I think that the uncomfortable future for a lot of the e-properties that people enjoy happens to hinge on the fact that the way they are the most useful clashes with the ways they can make money. Big time.

Facebook will sponsor stories, alienating users a little for eyeball time.

Twitter will make sure promoted things get their eyeball time by crushing 3rd party (alienating users).

Digg will- well. You know.

All of these moves hurt the utility of those companies. All of the companies know that.

But something happened with Digg, didn't it? The models of the above have to very carefully balance utility/pleasure of use with a certain amount of intrusiveness to make money because they have found few other good ways, though some get credit for experimenting.

And every time a major e-property does this they make a chink in their dam, inviting their sweet sweet reservoir of users to look beyond into a river of startups. Maybe there are more useful options out there for little fish. Cleaner spaces, open air. Let's be honest I'm bad at metaphors. Moving on.

Myspace became ridiculous and thousands (millions) fled to Facebook.

Digg became ridiculous and many fled to Reddit.

Twitter and Facebook are trying to monetize more and will become more ridiculous and less useful in the process. They might survive, but they are inviting others to take their place in the meantime.

And someday those new companies will build dams around users and either try to get them to gawk at more ads and maybe fall in the same way. This model seems to work for a little while, but they still need to solve the large clash of interest brought about by advertising. Search engines still do it best: ads displayed that try to match queries with relevant content aren't necessarily offensive to taste.

Almost everything else is still trading user abuse for irrelevant product. All users wanna do is talk about the kind of sandwich they ate. Nobody wants to "Learn how YOU can help Hyundai make August National Fuel-Efficiency month!" (real ad).

bluetidepro• 14 years ago

I couldn't agree more with your statement. User adaptation will always increase costs, and increased costs will always increase ads, and increased ads will always increase alienation. It's a lose-lose business model. It's very interesting to watch these companies win the hearts of millions of users then change, and lose those millions of users, in the matter of months or sometimes less. Crazy.

markkat4• 14 years ago

A very good point.

Ads are probably toxic to social media in most cases.

And worse than the ads, are the advertisers, and what they want.

markkat4• 14 years ago

Can we really say that we are individuals interacting with each other? When those that we interact with are only facets themselves?

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107417838165139717795/posts/XDXa...

thesagan2• 14 years ago

What I wonder is what the effect could be if Facebook or some other "social" company were to cut users' in to some of the ad revenue, e.g., as in somehow getting compensated for having your photo appear next to an ad for a company you "liked". I can imagine benefits, as well as strained trust, between the company and users -- but it seems to me that so far the users themselves have only played one part of the process when there may be a lot more to that.

But I haven't thought about this very in-depth yet, it's only crossed my mind once or twice reading these headlines. Can users, advertisers and "social" service providers interests overlap somewhere?

WalterSear• 14 years ago

No thanks.

falling• 14 years ago

Your compensation for being “used” in the advertisements is using the service, that’s how you pay for it.

Squanto• 14 years ago

This makes a lot of sense.

Facebook + Twitter alienate their users by watering down the experience with ads, losing the 'cool'ness they need to keep eyeballs on them.

I think that's where Google+ can swoop in and make Twitter+Facebook look like Myspace. Thoughts?

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

Why wouldn't Google+ also throw ads at us, since that's their core business?

antninja• 14 years ago

The Google+ API is not designed to empower third-party developers. Maybe they're still searching for a way to do it right, but currently it's too limited for an ecosystem to flourish. Why should a challenger come from a big company anyway? Both Facebook and Twitter were small startups during the fall of Myspace.

joebadmo2• 14 years ago

Yet another reason things systems like Twitter and Facebook shouldn't be silos with centralized control, but distributed, decentralized, self-hosted systems built on open standards.

demachina4• 14 years ago

I really can't see decentralized social networks being successful. If all hosts are going to be synced the traffic would be huge. If they aren't synced search for both messages and users would be painful. Patching together a stream when the people you follow are scattered across a hundred different servers painful. Account creation for average tech illiterate users painful. If they have to rely on some third party to provide a host, how is that any better than relying on Twitter or Facebook, as soon as the hoster decides it isn't worth the expense or to boot you for some random reason what happens?

Wouldn't it be better to build a centralized message bus and identity system under some kind of foundation like Wikipedia. You would have to get benefactors to fund it is the big problem. Twitter has proved itself to be a priceless service for communication and news streams, its like the real-time Wikipedia.

Its just major regrettable the people who are running it are completely trashing it in the predictable pursuit of the beloved buck and a fat IPO.

I'd love nothing more than foundation based centralized message bus and identity service offering API services to any and all responsible developers and apps, short text only messages and links to avoid all the issues with attachments little or no censorship, private communications between users encrypted so even the foundation can't read them or offer them up to prying governments, some mechanism to control and kill spam.

dm82• 14 years ago

What is the solution then? Ads are going to be integral part of the Internet.

Ads need native integration that is clean and unobtrusive. Nobody complains about Google AdWords. There is whole new industry of SEO/SEM around it.

I'm hopeful about "sponsored stories" or "sponsored tweets". I hope they will do well because they won't distract user like banners or interstitial. User can completely ignore sponsored stories.

MySpace was train-wreck due to its UI and it was never popular in masses (only teens loved it). Digg failed due to major UX upgrade and users fled to Reddit.

mdm_• 14 years ago

> "Learn how YOU can help Hyundai make August National Fuel-Efficiency month!"

Learn what YOU can do help OUR company! Dale Carnegie must be rolling in his grave.

sedev• 14 years ago

The takeaway lesson for me is that user-generated content is incompatible with advertising.

Now, as a caveat, I'm the sort of person who thinks that modern advertising is 99% toxic sludge in the mental environment: I am firmly in the Kalle Lasn camp. However, here's how I see it working: users come to the site because of the UGC, but advertising, by nature, has to grab attention at some level. You can't design for both "make the UGC, stuff users actually care about, primary" and "make sure that you get ad clickthroughs." Since the latter pays the bills, it tends to win - and users tend to leave because on one level or another, it's obvious that the site isn't about them (and if your site depends on UGC, your users ain't wrong to think that the site should be about them!)

The secondary takeaway is that advertising is not a long-term sustainable business model.

Advertising has a strong tendency to push startups into this insular turtles-all-the-way-down bullshit: social media with ads for analytics, analytics for ad-based startups, startups about how to reach demographics, and so on. They're as familiar an archetype around here as Punch & Judy. But it's all the tertiary economy, it's all flash: the fundamentals of advertising as a business model only get weaker over time. The effectiveness of advertising at all, in any context is debateable, and participating it is participating in an endless arms race. I argue that this should tell us that advertising is not the way to go if you want to build a lasting company: you need to take money in exchange for goods and services (real goods and services: advertising doesn't count, as I'm in the process of arguing).

That's hard! That's really difficult. PayPal, Square, and WePay should show us how ridiculously, gratuitously difficult the "take money for" part is, and taking people's money once you've convinced them that you've got something worth their money, is the easy part! Before you even get there, you have to build something good, and none of us should have any illusions that that's easy. Then between those two parts, there's "persuade users that your cool thing actually is cool and worth paying money for," and sweet leaping Buddhas that's a lifetime of work in itself (the lifetime of work, in fact, that advertising is doing in such a toxic and commons-destroying way right now).

But: you are a hacker. You are a hustler. You are an engineer.

Solving hard problems is your job.

Advertising is not a business model: advertising is a problem to be solved. Advertising is a bullshit legacy of past business models, here to be disrupted. The reason that I hang out on Hacker News is that I believe that its hackers, hustlers, and engineers are the people who can look at the way we do something now, think "that suck! I can do better than that!" and then do the difficult, frustrating, painful work to actually make something better, show people why it's better, and accept the monetary rewards that come from having made something better and proved it.

We can do this.

shurane• 14 years ago

This is sort of inspiring, but until I see more legitimate businesses making money off of a better model than advertising, it just doesn't mean much to say it. If people didn't have to pay for costs for things like bandwidth and marketing, we would probably see a lot less advertising too.

notatoad• 14 years ago

Your arguments about why UGC is incompatible with advertising seem like they could apply equally to all content.

i think a better argument is that unstructured UGC is incompatible with advertising. Pinterest, for example, seems to be doing all right, because their site is basically a repository of things people want to buy. StackOverflow doesn't seem to be having any issues using ads to monetize, because their niche makes their ad-space valuable to advertisers and relevant to users. Where facebook and twitter fail is that they have tons of data about users, but not about what users want at that particular instant. An ad for windows server hosting on ServerFault is not competing with the content, it's complementing the content. it's a natural progression that doesn't require me to refocus to be effective. Facebook knows what i like, but not what i'm thinking about. When i'm looking at pictures of friends, any advertisement requires me to refocus onto a different topic.

zitterbewegung• 14 years ago

Yea, advertising isn't a long term business model... tell that to Google, and most other successful advertising firms.

dmor• 14 years ago

As I start building a social sharing startup I know we might be crazy telling users, from day one, how we are making money on Referly (shared commissions on purchases they generate when they share product links - and matching social disincentives for spamming your friends and having a crappy signal to noise ratio of clicks to purchases) but I just don't see how companies doing the "bait and switch" of adding a business model later is going to keep working. People are getting smarter about this, and more aware that they are becoming the product when they use these services that are eventually ad-funded.

I'm not trying to say we are some genius with Referly, because the money from day one part does turn off some people and might be slowing our adoption a bit. But the upside is that we have to deliver a degree of utility that makes it worth it to the user to know we are making money (and they are making money too in our model).

Is this too much capitalist utopia - or could this really be a model for future businesses besides ours?

bbrian• 14 years ago

I can still see tweets in the iPad LinkedIn app, though possibly from before when the article was published. It would be a dream come true if people stopped being able to import Twitter into their LinkedIn. It's polluting.

gergles• 14 years ago

Yes, the limitation is that new tweets cannot be pulled in, but existing tweets are not going to be deleted.

I agree that seeing twitter feeds on the LinkedIn feed polluted it with garbage, and am glad on a personal level to see them going away.

i386• 14 years ago

Honestly, there are a whole lot more interesting problems to solve outside of Twitters ecosystem. Storm, meet teacup.

biggfoot2• 14 years ago

The little voice in my head just got a whole lot louder - "don't friggin build a business on someone else's business. Do your own shit!"

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

It is ok to build on somebody else's business IFF you have a contract in place protecting you. The problem is, today, there are few contracts signed because that would prevent tomorrow's pivot (that screws all of today's partners).

biggfoot2• 14 years ago

"Tomorrow's pivot" :) I think you summed up all of it with that phrase.

dm82• 14 years ago

Your quote reminds me of Netflix too. Here we have public company built on someone else's "business" (as Hollywood calls it).

ricardobeat2• 14 years ago

While they keep killing off third party apps, usage is going down in every circle I'm in, and I see myself using FB and Path more and more. I think they're making their own death bed.

suprgeek• 14 years ago

I think this is a Great wake-up call to everyone who builds on someone else's platform. You are not the master of the house - and can be kicked out at any time.

One way to circumvent this is to have binding legal stuff in place, another is bring so much unique value to the platform that the owners are scared of mass defections should they break your app.

With Twitter I do not see any Third-party app in this category. Only companies of the likes of Apple & Google have the necessary influence to cause Twitter to think twice before making incompatible changes. Others are toast.

zemaj• 14 years ago

Short answer - no.

There's a lot of people over-reacting to this situation. If you read Twitter's blog post its clear that they're following up on enforcing the API "Rules of the Road" they've had for over a year. https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-twitter-e...

Section !.5. clearly lays out the rules clients must follow "Your Service may be an application or client that provides major components of a Twitter-like end user experience (a "Client"). An example of a Client is a downloadable application that displays user timelines and allows users to create and search for tweets. If so, certain additional terms apply, including:"

These rules are actually pretty generous and plainly lay out their expectations for third party applications. It's unclear what led to Tweets being removed from LinkedIn, my guess would be that Twitter attempted to enforce their branding rules, LinkedIn declined and instead said they would remove the Tweets from being displayed entirely. It doesn't sound like Twitter just cut off access to LinkedIn or came up with new restrictions they haven't already been publishing (and compelling 3rd parties to comply with) for a long time.

Any business must deal with existential threats, be it from competitors, regulation or bad investments. Building a business on top of an API is just another potential risk, you need to decide if they company in question is a safe enough bet to play on, just like you have to decide the same thing for all other risks.

demachina4• 14 years ago

I think you either missed or are glossing over Michael Sippey's blog post today where he said "in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used". People aren't upset about the old "stricter guidelines" you are quoting, they are upset about the new ones.

It was poor judgement and poor PR to lob that out there before they were ready to actually spell out what these new "stricter guidelines" are. It creates fear, uncertainty and doubt among Twitter API developers and they are getting sick of fear, uncertainty and doubt, its been going on for a long time now.

Twitter's message bus, API and identity system have become valuable Internet resources. But Twitter has never been particularly great at thinking of innovative uses for it or developing great clients. There are a lot of really interesting and different ways to use those, regrettably they are trying to kill most of them and inflict a homogonized, boring, monoculture on their user base they can monotize, which will make the experience progressively worse.

At this point I imagine most API developers are wishing there was a new message bus they could move to but its a daunting challenge to field one, even more daunting to get a critical mass of messages moved over to it to make it interesting, and really daunting to fund it without resorting to all the lameness Twitter is now knee deep in.

ebiester• 14 years ago

Wait.. What other uses are there for a Twitter API? What I don't understand is why Twitter can't just insert their ads I to these API requests and be done with it.

Tichy• 14 years ago

There are I think over 100000 Twitter apps (don't remember the exact number, but it was a lot). I think those are not all Twitter clients.

DaNmarner• 14 years ago

"Twitter’s applications programming interface (API), the source code that allows the developers to have access to user account information and Tweets."

"Until Favstar came along in 2009, the Twitter star was a little-used and largely ignored feature."

Am I the only one that feels the author has some research to do?

zafriedman• 14 years ago

Always

Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

Related Stories