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Why Twitter Will Either Build A Web Client Or Buy Tweetdeck
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There is no doubt that Twitter is one of the most powerful tools on the web today (well apart from the last couple of days when it has been horrendous and down all the time). I use it for work for everything from talking to customers to monitoring what is being said about the brands and businesses we represent. In my social time it has replaced my need for Google Reader as the main place where I find great content and it enhances my TV viewing experience and provides insight in to sporting events that I would not normally have at the tips of my fingers. Increasingly Twitter is becoming a fundamental part of many of our lives. A lot of my interaction with Twitter doesn’t take place through Twitter itself though and I think that we could be about to see Twitter start to take some control back, here is why…
Twitter Web Experience Can Never Compete
The Twitter website is not bad. It does the basics and there is no doubt that Twitter are making improvements to make it better (I wouldn’t be surprised if the current downtime was all about a massive new update and improvement to the site) but there is only so far you can go with Twitter.com. The real power of Twitter lies in the clients that have been developed for it and when I say clients I really only mean Tweetdeck and Seesmic.As you can see with the graph below the growth of the Twitter website itself has never been spectacular anyway and it has always been the clients that have seen such stellar growth.
Developers Can Be Annexed
There was a it of a hullabaloo when Twitter announced that it would be entering the iPhone and Android client market but to be honest that was pretty much confined to developers who felt that they had been marginalized. As Twitter has grown in to the mainstream the general public actually have no idea what a client is or who actually builds them. They just want the best user experience possible. There would certainly be a huge uproar for a couple of weeks on all the tech blogs around the world but Twitter hold all the aces now and they might decide that it is in their interests to won the client market.
Grabbing Market Share And Revenue Streams
I am at the stage where I would probably pay a small fee for Tweetdeck if I was asked to. I know I am a power user and need it for work but I think there are a lot of businesses and individuals who could not live without their Twitter client. Twitter could build a pro version of their client (something similar to Tweetdeck) and add in additional functionality that would appeal to brands and businesses. Imagine if I could access the stats for people viewing my profile or the geographical breakdown of where my followers came from. That is the short of information that makes Facebook so valuable and I think that Twitter will need to start doing the same with some sort of power dashboard for brands.
Twitter Starting To Own The Mobile Apps
Up until recently the Twitter experience on mobile was all about what other 3rd party developers would offer you. The experience and usability was nothing to do with twitter at all. Twitter changed that by either launching their own apps or acquiring others so as they now have their own apps for iPhone, Blackberry and Android. The main reason that they gave for this move was that they wanted to control the Twitter experience and keep the quality levels up. In truth I think they realized that they were missing out on a key part of the chain and they were starting to get marginalized themselves by providing all this brilliant information where so many others were getting the value of that information but not Twitter themselves.
Will They Do It?
A large part of the success of Twitter has been down to the developers around the company who have helped grow it in to the monster that it is today. Business is however not a sentimental game and we have already seen that Twitter had no problem coming in and taking their ball back from the other kids for their mobile apps. Coming in to the web client space would be sure to annoy even more developers and push some of them away but Twitter might just see it as a calculated risk that is worth taking. They might also look to take the route of buying somebody and I really see huge potential in them acquiring Tweetdeck. As I said before I don’t think Tweetdeck is far away from being something that brands and businesses would pay for and with some additional functionality and some Twitter Pro branding you could just have a huge new revenue stream for Twitter. I personally think that they have to take this calculated risk. The real power of Twitter does not lie in the website but in 3rd party apps and I think to unlock the real potential of Twitter and their own monetization they need to control the complete package from mobile to web to clients.This is the only place where they don’t currently have a presence so I would say expect to see them here very soon.
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Love your thoughts on Twitter giving us access to stats on who’s viewing, following etc. There’s so much more we can gain from this – the possibilities are endless!
Yeah I think for brands especially being able to see some metrics would be very very useful. Anybody can turn around and game the system to have 5k followers but are those genuine followers, where are they from, how engaged are they etc etc. Thats when it gets really interesting and for twitter to unlock the value that is what they need to be doing!
They (twitter) have always claimed that they want to get the model right before they try to make money from it. Could this be a way for them now to start earning some revenue?
Not even sure if they need to do it for the revenue just yet. The fact is that they will make for more money of ads if that opens up than any other sort of premium service but just controlling the whole platform and how users use it would be the most important from what I could see
Some interesting views here Niall. But I don’t think that they will be buying something like Tweetdeck, simply because Tweetie had a desktop app for mac, and that tweet deck also integrates with Foursquare now, while Twitter themselves want to invest in geo-location. So if anything they will probably have their team built a desktop based on the Tweetie and their other mobile app fully utilizing their API engine including their own geo-location platform.
If I’m not mistaken they will have some analytics for advertisers and their sponsored tweets, called “resonance”. From what I could tell they have modelled a way to measure the effectiveness and engagement on the sponsored tweets. Although I’m not entirely sure I understood that correctly.
In terms of analytics I don’t think they will be releasing something themselves but rather sell that data to companies to built analytics around, and thus directly generating revenue from data sale. Plus their developer’s ecosystem will likely end up building some interesting analytics platforms around the annotations system when it is released. So you probably will see analytics by Seesmic & Tweetdeck for their users based on the annotations they will come up with for their own apps.
That could be the biggest problem for Twitter though, that everyone can make their own assumptions as to what Twitter analytics should look like and how tweets should be made relevant. Perhaps it is this space in the Twitter-verse that will foster the next Twitpic/Tweetie startup making some serious money if they can figure how to make analytics app/platform independent. But we will have to wait and see.