Ask HN: Twitter As A Platform?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517273

by alexmacgregor • 17 years ago

12 9 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Straight forward question and I would like the opinion of HN: Can you build a successful product/service based on Twitter?

We've seen Kevin Rose launch wefollow.com recently and there's more mashups coming you'd suspect but can it really spawn compelling services?

I have some ideas, and leveraging Twitter's user base would accelerate growth and exposure, but i'm not sure if relying completely on the API is the right way to go about it.

adrianwaj• 17 years ago

http://www.tweetlater.com/ are making money.

pg• 17 years ago

My guess is yes. Twitter is a new protocol, and in the past new protocols have always generated new companies. The one catch here is that this protocol is controlled by a private company. So you'd have to worry about the possibility that if you did something successful, they'd try to take it over themselves.

I think one could probably protect oneself, though, by doing something that's enabled by Twitter, but very far removed from the kind of thing the Twitter guys understand. E.g. don't try to do search for Twitter, because Twitter will probably own that. But if you did something combining, say, Twitter and real estate, they'd probably steer clear of it.

ntoshev• 17 years ago

search.twitter.com is actually provided by a company called Summize that Twitter bought: so it worked for them.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

Taking over from a success would hurt the overall efforts to be a protocol, as other developers and companies wouldn't take part.

Much better for everyone would be some kind of official support with a rev share.

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

Absolutely. We've been using the OAuth system with Ramamia for the past month or so. OAuth itself is going to have a big impact on things developed for twitter. It makes accessing an app for a user, as easy as a facebook app. It also will allow for a real directory of applications. Up until now, things have been ad-hoc and hacked together.

There's very few things I'd see Twitter competing against you with and doing themselves. They realize they are the telephone lines, not the telephone maker. It's why they haven't created an official Twitter client or really made huge improvements on their mobile interface (you can't even view protected tweets.)

You can also reach a lot more people with your twitter stream than Facebook. It's not uncommon for users to have 5k+ followers on Twitter. Up until recent that's been the MAX on Facebook. With the new redesign, we'll see.

So yeah, Twitter == LONG (mandatory that's what she said).

markbao• 17 years ago

Also, I'm Jason's business partner at Ramamia, and I developed the Twitter OAuth stuff for our app. I open-sourced the base code for OAuth/Twitter (written Ruby on Rails) we were using for it, and wrote a little app on top of it. Here's the github link: http://github.com/markbao/lightwitter/tree/master (w/ thanks also to kelliott who contributed fixes)

joshsharp• 17 years ago

Like you, I'm worried about building something on a proprietary protocol. One company having control means they can arbitrarily deny you access if they don't want competition on a particular feature set, for example. Having said that, it hasn't stopped people building lots of Facebook and iPhone apps...

For what it's worth, I have a service that archives people's tweets and lets them export to CSV (for reference/searching/stats, whatever). I plan to make a little bit of money off it generating nicely-formatted PDFs of tweets and pushing them through to lulu.com to be sold as paperbacks - a lot of people seem keen on the idea. We'll see how it goes.

froo• 17 years ago

>Straight forward question and I would like the opinion of HN: Can you build a successful product/service based on Twitter?

Absolutely, look at Summize (now Twitter Search) and Friendfeed who has a large amount of data in the form of Tweets.

You also have the clients, eg Twhirl (purchased by Loic Le Meur) and Tweetdeck which is another format you could follow. I'm sure some iPhone apps that focus on Twitter do very well for themselves too.

There is still plenty of opportunity out there. I had an idea for something that wasn't a part of the API last year (I emailed Alex asking if it was due anytime and he said it was on the list). I just checked the API now and it seems like its there, so I may give it a go soon.

Honestly though, I'd say start with small ambitions on scalable infrastructure (eg AWS) and grow from there. You'll know if you hit a chord as stuff spreads through Twitter like wildfire.

In fact, given this trait of Twitter, I'd suggest its a perfect protocol to build/iterate upon as you get almost instant feedback on whether you're going the right way.

alexmacgregor• 17 years ago

Thanks for the input guys, think I will go for it but obviously, monetizing/paying the bills might prove difficult therefore I'm going to work on it part-time for the moment.

Re. joshsharp, good point about the proprietary nature but hopefully Twitter will allow further customization of profiles/data in the future. For me, the reason Twitter has grown so quickly has been due to its simplicity, both to a regular user and developer.

There's been some great apps though, some mentioned here I've tried, and hopefully one day aside from takeovers, there will be real options to earn revenue from them.

Ask HN: Twitter As A Platform?

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