Twitter Challenge
msg:
Twitter presents their audience with a challenge - if you don’t like what we’ve done, you have every means to make it better for free, so don’t complain, do something.
Originally posted as a comment by gbattle on betaworks using Disqus.For nearly every other company, the comsumers’ response to the “Twitter Challenge” is to give up, walk away, and never think twice. Other companies have equally open APIs (many inspired by Twitter), yet why is the consumer response in the case of Twitter’s problems, “Man, this is broken, I should spend 30 hours hacking their API to scratch my itch”? They’re doing something right, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is.
I think the answer is that there isn’t much to it. Facebook, for example, exposes lots of data to the platform and connect. I still haven’t seen anything interesting come out of it, because it is hard to makes apps that take advantage of the information.
What twitter did right was expose and API and also add value by cutting features you’d expect in a social network. The features are so simple that derivative apps are using every feature available. Any developer can imagine making a twitter based application, because the space is so simple.
Both very insightful comments, but I’ll add two items to consider to explain what I mean by the “innovation stack” (it was in the rest of the quote). Many other alleged open API’s focus on the generation side of the equation - how can outside developers pump their content into the walled garden of the proprietary application. For instance, for the longest time, all of Facebook’s consumption happened within Facebook proper or one of their own applications (Blackberry, iPhone). They wanted to own the content. The “Twitter Challenge”, if you will, exposes both the generation and consumption sides of Twitter to the extent where everyone can own the content (except direct messages and private accounts, of course). With Twitter’s open API, you can completely replicate their entire database.
This is how Summize (now Twitter Search) came into being.
With the rise of Twitter Search comes applications like TipJoy, StockTwits and bit.ly, leveraging those open APIs. What will be the next addition to the Twitter innovation stack and become part of the platform? Semantic search? Sentiment analysis? News aggregation? Analytic framework? Only time will tell.
