[cletus]

This doesn't surprise me at all. When you develop on someone else's platform, you have to walk a fine line between not being successful at all and being too successful such that the platform provider co-opts your business (maybe you get lucky and get bought out). This is nothing new. Such moves as this were (IMHO) inevitable. They'll slowly chip away at anything they see as taking revenue from them.

The part I disagree with is that this will doom Twitter. It will not. They've already achieved a certain level of success. Most people use and will continue to use the Website or the official client and be happy with that.

I do believe that Twitter is doomed to be acquired however. Apple seems the likely frontrunner for this but I think Twitter needs Apple more than Apple needs Twitter at this point.

Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.

There are many reasons I'm glad about Facebook's floundering market debut. This is one of them: it's taking the wind out of the sails of the social hype (IMHO).

[ChuckMcM]

"Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace."

Like others I tire of the dragging out Myspace as that guy who started on weed and ended up an incontinent meth addict in the gutter but the core of this premise is correct, the 'useful' part of Twitter is as an infrastructure.

Small digression, when I was at Sun we had pushed out NFS to anyone and everyone, it was completely 'open' in the sense that we published all the protocols and anyone could build a compatible clients. Since this was web 0.01 the only servers and clients were in the same building generally but still the easy access, the documented protocol, and a thousand flowers bloomed. You could get your implementation 'blessed' as being standard by coming to Connectathon and proving you could interact with all of the other approved implementations there. NFS is everywhere, available for nearly every compute platform. It was infrastructure.

At an important meeting on the future of NFS (and a new proposed product called "ONC plus" which would have per client charges, and strict licensing controls. I argued with Ed Zander (then president of Sunsoft) over the wisdom of changing the NFS model. The business development guys had computed that if everyone that was currently using NFS was paying just $10 per client per year for a license, SunSoft would be the most profitable part of the Sun Microsystems universe. I asked Ed if he knew how many people would run NFS if it were $10/client, he pointed to the bizdev projections, and I told him no, it would be exactly zero. Zero because nobody would pay money to Sun for a technology they were not sure would work (AT&T had tried that with their DFS product in System V), and they certainly wouldn't base a business that needed it if Sun could pull the plug at any time or raise the price. And finally, the whole 'Open' thing only worked when you allowed other people to play. As I recall he reminded me to stick to the technical decisions and leave making a business out of it to people who understood such things.

Twitter is Twitter because it is Twitter. That twisted circular definition captures that something simple and free caught the imagination of millions of people and became something greater than itself. It became an infrastructure. But unlike Cities or other large corporations which have a revenue stream to cover the costs of their infrastructure, Twitter does not.

And so they are in the throes of discovering what is, and what is not, a business opportunity in the Twitter universe. And that discovery process is painful, and prone to missteps. Seeing Myspace wheezing in the gutter I do not think they would make the same exact missteps, while they could end up irrelevant, they have more options. They do need to understand how people value them, and understand how much of that value is "them" and how much is their partners. That is a complex thing. A great example of that process is looking at their on again / off again 'firehose' pricing model.

I think they have a lot going for them, but they have to figure this stuff out, and quickly. Folks like Google and Apple and Facebook aren't going to just sit around and do nothing. Watching them walk through the minefield that is API handling should be instructive to anyone here who hopes to do the same at some point.

[bbuffone]

There is one thing that twitter and facebook have that no one else in the history of... well... anything i can think of.

> They have an unlimited product placement budget.

Every TV Show, News program, Commercial, Website, Company... places the "Go to facebook.com/ford" or "tweet us @nbcnews".

This results in billions of dollars of advertising and they need to pay nothing. This helped build both twitter and facebook. Google should figure out how to get this for Google Plus. Once they do they can expand as quickly as twitter and facebook.

[simonh]

>Google should figure out how to get this for Google Plus.

Spoiler alert - the answer is 'be as popular as Twitter and Facebook'.

T & F didn't become so popular because of product placement. They got the product placement because they were so popular.

[jgroome]

> the answer is 'be as popular as Twitter and Facebook'

Also, proper URLs.

"Add your voice to the conversation! Just go to plus dot google dot com slash 114124849657167573853".

[misiti3780]

haha google plus urls definitely suck

[ChuckMcM]

A good comment but I think you have it backward. When NBC puts "tweet this story" in the HTML frame that isn't advertising for twitter per se, that is NBC hoping that you will give NBC free advertising by spreading awareness of a story around the web. When the Tahoe ski resorts say "Take Interstate 80 to Truckee" they aren't advertising I80, but they are causing a lot of traffic to be generated, and that traffic is going to cause road damage that needs repair.

This is what I mean by "figuring out their (Twitter's) value."

Imagine that their API is really a bunch of method calls into the Twitter 'object'. They could, as an example, make their simple API 'free' and as you tried to do more complex things charge for those things. Presumably they would structure it so that folks could make 'useful' twitter clients for free, but they would have to pay some price for making more full featured clients.

Of course the challenge there is that you can't really charge for features that can be built out of the free protocol stubs, because people will just scrape those free ones and get around your code.

[leak]

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but MySpace had the same exact thing for companies..."Check out our MySpace" was everywhere.

[6ren]

Why did MySpace fail? Users are known to be sticky - they tend to stay with the same newspaper, brand of chocolate, chewing gum, household cleaning products and so on. But they are only sticky up to a point. If something is better by a sufficiently significant margin, then they will switch (or some will). You can keep those customers just by just matching your competitor's improvements. For many things, the pace of change is reasonably slow. Also, many people just like that specific taste (even if they don't think it tastes as nice - like Coke and New Coke). There is some change (e.g. sugar-free gum), but it's easy for the leaders to keep pace. Perhaps in some cases, the scope for possible improvement is less than the margin needed for users to switch - so you ever fail.

MySpace had that huge advantage of many sticky users, but they stopped improving it, and a competitor (Facebook) made an improved experience.

Twitter is safe for as long as there isn't a sufficiently better competitor - "better" being in terms of the benefit to users, not any engineering quality in itself.

[dasil003]

MySpace grew from music. Every single band was MySpace—all of them. This is what they leveraged to go from Friendster-level early adopter popularity, to mainstream youth popularity. This was huge, but they never got past this because MySpace always felt like an Internet underbelly sight. For the same reason that 50 years ago, grownups did not spend hours gabbing away on the telephone like teenagers, MySpace could never make inroads into the 25+ market segments.

Facebook rolled through phase 1 by being exclusive, then phase 2 by first saturating college students, then they exploded beyond what any social network had ever known by offering a clean, curated and controllable experience that steadily roped in older people by being the place to stay in touch with younger friends and family.

I always laugh when people trot out MySpace as a cautionary tale for Facebook, because it's irrelevant. MySpace was the 500lb gorilla in 2004, but Facebook is the only 5000lb gorilla that ever existed. Whatever bring them down won't be for the same reasons that MySpace failed.

[saalweachter]

Fun Fact: MySpace launched August 2003, Facebook February 2004. For all intents and purposes, MySpace isn't any older than Facebook.

[seunosewa]

People joined Facebook because they could connect to all their old schoolmates on Facebook. And this was because they started out as a school network. Myspace would have failed even if they kept improving it, if that one feature was missing.

[minikites]

Remember AOL Keywords?

[bbuffone]

Now you mention it, i do, but i remember they rarely mentioned AOL's name. they would just say. Enter keyword *.

[wtvanhest]

That was before everyone had the internet.

[icebraining]

But aren't those "free ads" a result of their large userbase, not a cause? I think FB and Twitter were already very big and influential before those started popping up.

[bbuffone]

Facebook definitely had a large user base, but twitter was still relatively small. Also for the mass market, you need advertising and reinforcement of the product. The free product placement through traditional media has given both facebook and twitter that for free.

[dm8]

Everyone cites Myspace. Either Twitter or Facebook does something controversial and we hear everyone citing Myspace. Myspace didn't lose it's user base due to amazing UX for end-user. They lost their user base due to combination of bad UX and "mobile" user base. Majority of Myspace users were teenagers and by the time they went to college they had hot new social network in form of Facebook, which was exclusively for them. And Myspace was never big in non-English speaking markets.

Twitter on the other hand offers good UX. They have loyal user base of millions of users from different age groups. They are huge in Asian markets. And they have celebrity users, governments, political leaders, olympians etc. It will be very hard to move entire user base from Twitter to some other service.

App.net is an interesting alternative. And they can disrupt real-time information market. I think App.net can have number of use cases like firehose of realtime feeds for devs . But killing Twitter entirely will be very hard!

EDIT 1: Grammar

EDIT 2: Twitter for me is more than infrastructure utility. It's my primary information network.

[shardling]

>Twitter on the other hand offers good UX

Every time I go to twitter in a browser I want to punch whoever designed it in the face. It is by far and away the most annoying site I encounter on a daily basis, which is impressive given that all I want it to do is display plaintext.

[raverbashing]

So much this

I figure out they have 2 designers there, one really good and one that doesn't have the slightest idea of UX and design

Case in point: the way DMs are notified to the user. That's right, in the previous web version it wasn't. And this version is better, but not great

[ido]

Doesn't it send you an email if you get DMs?

[danudey]

I've turned that off, because I tend to get notifications in my clients. There's no good Windows client yet though, so when I'm on my gaming machine and don't have my phone handy, I use the web client for tweeting, and I never notice DMs.

[RandallBrown]

I like Echofon a lot. Their Windows client is essentially just their firefox plugin running as it's own app, but it's pretty good.

I especially like that I can sync all the tweets I've read between my Windows machine at work, my iPhone, and my Mac at home. I don't know of any other app that works for those 3 platforms and has syncing.

[raverbashing]

It's configurable

[jsz0]

It's also a huge difference in scale. MySpace ultimately stumbled on a comparatively small stage. IIRC at it's height they had maybe 80-100 million legitimate accounts. A mass migration of say 20 million users in a short period of time is something totally different than say 100 million users. FaceBook also had about 50% as many users by the time MySpace hit their numerical peak. So to apply that to Twitter I think some new service would have to grow about 100 million users and then steal about 100 million from Twitter.

[azakai]

> I think App.net can have number of use cases like firehose of realtime feeds for devs

Devs already have a twitter-like firehose, and it's even open source, identi.ca

[nl]

Twitter is ultimately infrastructure

Bullshit.

To reinforcer this point: in the early days of Twitter it kept falling over under the load - the one thing infrastructure should never do. It didn't matter.

To further reinforcer this point: OSStatus/Identi.ca has a widely deployed, API compatible implementation of Twitter. That really is infrastructure, and yet it has had approximately zero impact on Twitter's growth or strategy - because Twitter isn't infrastructure.

(Unless you mean it in the way that every single online service is ultimately infrastructure - but I don't think this is what you meant).

Twitter has eyeballs too

You say that like it is a minor point, whereas actually it is 90% of what matters.

It also has the publishers people want to follow, for whatever your particular niche is.

social platforms seem fickle at best

Actually, social platforms aren't fickle: they are usually incredibly sticky (see the huge number of forums that have been running for 10+ years). Most people just look at the "social network" category and see how Friendster/MySpace/Bebo/Hi5/etc all got destroyed by the Facebook juggernaut.

They never talk about the success of LinkedIn/PInterest/Twitter/Reddit/etc.

In every case, those overran competitors of their own (including Facebook in some cases) to dominate their categories.

That's not "fickle", that is platform strategy and product development.

There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.

MySpace sold to News Ltd, and then went downhill. Maybe Twitter won't sell itself to a company that is actively internet-hostile. But yes, you are correct: potentially any company could fail.

[dasil003]

> MySpace sold to News Ltd, and then went downhill. Maybe Twitter won't sell itself to a company that is actively internet-hostile. But yes, you are correct: potentially any company could fail.

I don't think that's it. I don't remember the acquisition disrupting their strategy much. Rather I think the quality of their code base and inability to keep up with Facebook's agility is what drove the nails in the coffin.

[nl]

* I don't remember the acquisition disrupting their strategy much.*

I find it very interesting that the rate of growth in MySpace's membership slowed significantly with 6 months of being bought[1].

I think the quality of their code base and inability to keep up with Facebook's agility is what drove the nails in the coffin

I agree 100%. And I think News Ltd was to blame: they didn't (don't) understand the internet, and didn't know how to manage a high-growth property like MySpace.

But then again, it could all be co-incidence.

[1] http://www.petehatesmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/mys...

[misiti3780]

quality of their codebase?

[jlgreco]

Maybe not quality of the code base per se, but Forbes had an article a while ago that called out ColdFusion as one of the contributing causes of their demise: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenwunker/2011/07/25/4-moral...

I don't know to what extent that is fair, but I can only imagine that at the very least highering the best and the brightest to work on a coldfusion project could be.. tough.

[shawnee_]

Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization

Interesting take. Seems almost exactly the opposite to me. What makes Twitter valuable is not the "eyeballs," or even the infrastructure, but rather the pulse of content. It had what essentially amounted to first-mover advantage in the sphere of mobile content, and that is why none of the Twitter clones have been able to take its place.

That said, this direction Twitter is going toward "more closed" is wrong. Given that it's the market-researcher's goldmine of content that makes Twitter valuable, disallowing developers the ability to build infrastructure on top of that content seems really stupid. Raw data is not useful; the organizing of, packaging and presenting of that data is where the business value can be (profitably) delivered. It can be profitable for both Twitter and developers.

[nikcub]

> Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization.

This couldn't be further from the truth, and the thousands of copycat networks, not least from Google, are proof that networks can't be commoditized.

The only reason I am still on GitHub, Facebook, hn, reddit and Twitter - despite there being better 'products' and 'infrastructure'- is because everybody else is, and the same applies to them.

[kapowaz]

The two are not mutually exclusive. It is infrastructure, but it's also subject to network effects.

[hollerith]

Your comment is correct, but misses the point: grandparent was contesting "infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization", not "Twitter is ultimately infrastructure".

[potatolicious]

I don't think this move, in an of itself, will doom Twitter, but it is just another example of why Twitter and its model aren't working.

The problem with Twitter is the same problem that plagues innumerable startups - they've built a product without even once thinking about the business model, and are not scrambling for revenue.

Inexorably, everything they do in the pursuit of revenue is going to involve making the product worse for users. Ad injection, loss of 3rd-party apps that support the ecosystem, all of that is just example after example of how a business with no built-in monetization will eventually cannibalize itself in the pursuit of revenue.

[inthewoods]

I'm not sure you can claim a company that is likely bringing in $540m in revenue this year and is expected to bring in $1b in 2014 not working. Or that it has no built-in monetization. Sure those numbers could be/likely are inflated, but there is still real money flowing to Twitter.

Obvious they may be "priced" at a higher valuation - but anyone looking to buy them is going to have to pay up - they are a rare commodity if they are hitting those revenue numbers.

Personally, I've expected this for a while and never understood why anyone would spend time on developing a client - unless you're developing something for a business to manage their social network. I am a bit surprised they don't just put some requirements on what clients have to carry in terms of advertising and that would be it.

Reality of the situation is that most 3rd party clients outside of Twitter probably aren't that big relative to people going to Twitter directly now.

[BerislavLopac]

Twitter is ultimately infrastructure

I think this is the most important point, one that most people -- Twitter included -- seem to overlook or ignore.

What we need is an open Twitter-like protocol -- but for it to be successful it should be peer-to-peer, not server-based like Twitter. A few year ago I was working on a startup which would build precisely such a protocol, but my partners backed out before we could lift anything off ground.

One of ideas was to make the client double as a Twitter client, in order to attract a wider user base. This would be less viable now, with the new Twitter API restrictions, but I would still love to see someone develop something like that.

[huskyr]

Well, there's OStatus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus), which is supposed to be an open standard for microblogging.

[BerislavLopac]

No, it's not quite what I had in mind. OStatus is intended for exchange of updates between sites that have statuses (statii?), while I'm thinking of something that would exchange messages between users directly without the need for a central server (except probably for user discovery and connection).

[tannerburson]

So you're wanting to reinvent XMPP?

[BerislavLopac]

Actually, XMPP the underlying technology we finally decided upon, just before the team fell apart. But the concept was to make a product that is based on it, but with a different feature set from the usual IM/chat clients we see.

[alphang]

I don't see the part about this change dooming Twitter in the article.

You have an interesting point about commoditization, however. It makes me think about the IM space and all the different services there.

As for eyeballs, I think a Twitter competitor can do what media companies do — pay for certain celebrities, authors, speakers to move their microblog to their service — do a few of those, and you'll start to have an audience.

[Tichy]

"There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace."

Is there anything preventing any social network from becoming the next MySpace? Seems to me it is all in the users, if the users leave you are the next MySpace. I don't see how you could force users not to leave?

[andrewfelix]

Interesting point about being acquired.

Do you think perhaps restricting 3rd party clients is a way to make them more appealing to a potential buyer like Apple?

[PakG1]

If they're appealing to Apple, I'd say it's because they already have such a big partnership with Apple in iOS integration. For whatever reasons the partnership was appealing, an acquisition would likewise be appealing.

[Hari_Seldon]

Maybe, but Apple would be inclined to make it Mac / iOS only, which would be counter productive. The other non Apple stuff has had a strategic importance, iTunes for windows enabled them to sell iPods and Safari for windows helped with website compatibility. Can't see this happening.