Careful Twitter. Opportunity is knocking on your door.
If I was in Jack Dorsey and Biz Stones I would be monetising their Twitter asset fast, damn fast. Sell it, open it up, whatever it takes. I think they aren’t far away from being standardised out of their current business model unless they can quickly fix their scale problems.
Driven by reliability issues on the Twitter platform, a plethora of conversation emerged this week. Bloggers and tech commentators are turning their conversation to workarounds. It’s as though the conversations and connections in Twitter have become bigger than Twitter itself. The conversation is alive and it wants to fix itself.
One example is Techcrunch’s coverage by Chris Saad of Dataportability.org. His workaround is micro bloggers using tools that are certified as compliant with a microblogging standard (posts of 140 characters and no titles). Users install complaint software on their own servers like you would blog software. He expects this to emerge from the opensource arena.
Personally I disagree, Twitter is successful because it’s easy. Easy to get started, easy to play, easy to have fun. I don’t want to install an app on a server to use a Twitter like product. I love the SaaS Twitter engine and the ecosystem of desktop and websites that have evolved around it.
It’s much like blogging where it’s just a small hassle managing a blog on a server. However, it’s still a hassle. I’d rather someone take care of that for me. My attitude to Chris’s self hosted microblogging application is the same – you’re taking my time away!
Twitter is most at risk from 3rd party application builders who have built desktop apps for Twitter. They are well positioned to build into emerging microblogging engines and thus becoming the microblogging feed readers. In much the same way RSS Readers cover many blog platforms. To do this standards are needed.
So there’s three pieces to the microblogging picture:
- Platform
- Reader
- Standard
I expect one ‘rough’ standard across many platforms the way RSS has evolved. After all who seriously owns a 140 character field limit? How can you protect that?
I think the big mistake Twitter could make right now is to delay fixing their infrastructure in any way. As your post obviates, all they have is their user-base; the worst thing they could do is alienate them. If I were Twitter, I’d be spending big money to make the platform as stable and open as possible. This would cement Twitter as “the micro-blogging platform” for the foreseeable future.
Don’t know if it’ll happen, though.
I agree, it’s a catch 22 they are in. When I was writing this post all I could think about was Macromedia (Adobe) Flash and how openness saved it from competitors.