How Twitter Is Coming Of Age
Twitter has been making plenty of noise over the last week mostly around their own conference Chirp and it really stands out as a week where a lot of decisions that have been taken over the last 6 months seem to be coming to fruition. I think what we are seeing in front of our eyes is a business that has come through a tough year and is scaling right in front of eyes and introducing some key features and initiatives that will see it become an integral part of our social media lives over the coming years. Sure there are still going to be problems especially around the revenue side of things and the model may change significantly over the next 12 months but the good news for Twitter and their own long term success is that at least they have set sail on the course for turning an incredibly popular tool in to a fully fledged successful business that has a very bright long term future…
The Numbers Are Strong
There had been all sorts of speculation over the last six months that the numbers were stalling or that people were perhaps accessing Twitter only through 3rd party apps or even that a small percentage of power users were driving most of the tweets but Twitter themselves always held those numbers close to their chest until this week. Twitter announced that it had 105 Million users on the site and says its still adding 300,000 users per day. The other key number to come out of the chirp conference is that about 75% of the traffic to Twitter does as expected come through 3rd party applications which would explain some of the charts showing that Twitter growth had flat lined
Twitter Making Some Hard Calls
One of the main reasons for getting to where it has today is the ecosystem of developers that Twitter has built up around the company and by nurturing that community Twitter has been able to harness massive growth. There are 1000s of applications that improve the Twitter experience and as the stats show only 25% of users use the web interface. Apps are one of the main ways that people use the service (especially while on the go) and until now Twitter had no official presence in many app stores. With their acquisition of Tweetie they made a very brave call because although they made the app free and will improve it’s features further Twitter stepped in to the developers territory for the first time and fire shots across the bows of massively popular Twitter clients such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck. The last thing Twitter wants to do is upset it’s development community but it has clearly taken the hard decision that in order to control the service better and ultimately generate more revenues it needs official apps and that is why the also launched the less controversial official blackberry app as well. The storm over Twitter upsetting the developers will soon be forgotten and we will soon all be using official Twitter clients both on our mobiles and desktops in my opinion. This is tough for people who have built their whole business in plugging the gaps in Twitter’s product by offering apps up until now but they have to accept that the businesses they started were built on shaky ground in the first place and move on.
Revenue Models
I am still not 100% sold on the sponsored tweets format that Twitter is starting to roll out with selected advertising partners but the news that they have rolled out a revenue model has be seen as good news. There will be a lot of tinkering and Twitter themselves admitted that the ads will be confined to Twitter search results for now but with them announcing that users carry out 600 million searches per day alone you can see the huge potential in this area alone.
The wait for a revenue model has taken some time but this is the first tentative steps being taken and even if some users voiced some initial concerns about the ads the voices of disapproval have not been too strong with most people realizing that the ads need to be integrated at some stage. From what Twitter have been saying this only the start of the revenue generating featured that they will be including and the softly softly approach has to be admired in terms of trying to strike the balance between coming up with a cash generating system and not upsetting the users. It’s not the amazing advertising product that they promised but it is interesting and Twitter are generating some cash without upsetting users too much so a move in the right direction.
Solid Platform
Twitter has been doing some great work in the last 6 months getting the platform to become more solid and as a result you rarely see the fail whale up above that used to be so common on the site. In fact it is probably only older users of the site who know the whale well as it appears so seldom now and that is a real credit to the work Twitter have put in to stabilize the platform and scale it through their insane growth. The 100 million in funding that they have raise in funding is certainly being well used in terms of making a better platform and small announcements this week that further improvements are on the way including making Twitter real time and not having to rely on the API to update will only improve things further.
New Features
At the same time as stabilizing as a platform Twitter is quickly and efficiently rolling out new features that will help it to become and even more important part of our daily lives. One of the biggest was @anywhere which we wrote about a couple of days ago and allows you to add (check us @simplyzesty) Twitter features to your own site in very much the same way as Facebook connect does. It’s aim is clearly to become a fabric of the web and have Twitter as a key feature on websites all over the world. Another features that Twitter is rolling out to go along with their geolocation services is places which will help aggregate information about popular real world places based on the location of people’s tweets. This is very much in Foursquare’s space and although not a direct competitor to the popular checkin game I can see Twitter and their community of developers moving more towards location based features over the rest of the year.
Where To Next?
As we can see form all the sections above Twitter is well on it’s way to growing in to a multi billion dollar tech company along the lines of Facebook and Google and the future really is very bright for them. They have a huge user base which is growing very rapidly, they also have plenty of cash and crucially are stabilizing their platform and adding better features that improve the experience for all their users. They seem to be taking the hard decisions and taking ownership of the key areas of their business that they need to control but didn’t until recently and crucially they are rolling out revenue features that although not universally popular (when are they?) with users have not caused huge uproar either. I must admit that I thought the future was a little bumpy for Twitter about 5 months ago but they have come through a difficult phase of growth very well indeed and look like they are going to be around for a long time to come. They may even reach their goals of getting a billion users and becoming the “pulse of the planet”.
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