Parentheticals & Excursions

It’s difficult not to interpret the latest Twitter API announcement by Ryan Sarver as anything other than a clear instruction that competition with Twitter’s client applications will not be tolerated. For me, the stand-out quote was:

More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.

I personally think that this public statement has irrevocably set Twitter down an inferior path; what investor will now seriously fund third-party applications that augment Twitter? I’m not saying that this move will necessarily stop Twitter from being a successful company, but I do feel that its scope as a platform has been diminished.

I don’t think it ever needed to take this route. Here’s one business model I would have loved to see Twitter adopt…

• Extend the Twitter APIs to include adverts with tweets.
• Leave the display of adverts up to the client applications.
• Impose terms and conditions on displaying the adverts (eg. that clients cannot include any other adverts or promotions, that they must not mislead users into clicking the ads, etc.)
• Share the revenue generated from the adverts with the application developers.

This would have required extensive monitoring of third party applications (though ad networks already face similar challenges), but it seems like a ‘maximizing’ strategy to me: third-party clients continue to proliferate, have an incentive to increase user engagement and to generate revenue for Twitter.

Of course, it’s easy to comment from the sidelines.