There's now 75k registered Twitter apps. You're not going to be successful making a generic client. Think bigger: there's plenty of room for success in other Twitter verticals.
The v1 isn't the hard part of building a competitor to Twitter. The hard part is scaling the user base, getting funding to keep the site running and being able to grow it.
Actually, I feel more comfortable now with Twitter after this.
Why? They have come out and said it. We know their direction now and what they intend: don't make another client, but make a /unique way of using twitter itself/
If anything, this is exactly what we need as entrepreneurs. We now have a mandate from the source to take their platform and ecosystem to the next level. If everyone else wants to quake in their boots over this silliness, then I say go for it.
I should see the site and try out the service and watch the result to judge. Nevertheless, I'll stay disappointed from Startups that are Twitter Apps or Twitter Related. Twitter is a new phenomena, it's hot because it got lot of TV, media coverage: 30% or even less are inactive and also consider the non-real users (Spam bot, feeds, apps...). It's too early to consider Twitter a success to build your startup upon it.
You still cannot release a twitter client that doesn't get maxed at 100,000 users. Why bother implementing ideas when it will probably meet with the same problem due to our success.
>Twitter succeeded because it was a dumb, open pipe that developers made awesome apps for. Twitter is now acting like they don't have developers to thank for their success.
Succeeded as in "they got lots of users". Not succeeded as in "they made lots of money".
Twitter mostly cares for the second, it's not a non profit service.
I've noticed the same thing, but fortunately for the twitter folks, someone (teenagers?) seems to think their app is useful.
It seems impossible to judge the success of an app like that before it's launched. Fortunately, I guess when you are a VC throwing around 10s of thousands of dollars at something as unproven as that doesn't seem too risky (a huge upside potential, with little downside).
This is definitely the moat against having another Twitter but a lot of things have a lots of users.
There's something else about it, a culture which tells what people should expect from it maybe. There must be something else because anyone with lot's of users is supposed to be able to inflate and take over everything but this is not happening.
About the main point of the post, I remember not having a good feeling at Twitter's strangling the 3rd party apps. It's possible that they already have all the people willing to chat in public about anything now (and the marketers) so they won't grow much more than this, but for sure a thousand companies developing business models on the top of a 140-characters messaging bus can have more ideas about expanding the platform than the only one controlling the bus. Problem: not all those ideas will benefit Twitter, some of them could even be detrimental to it. I think it's a sort of common dilemma, my platform or theirs, my vision or the one of customers? Historically both choices played well or badly. Twitter made their bet, let's wait another couple of years and see.
> That's right, they all failed because the users don't care about the technologies and the APIs.
I'm so glad we agree on this. Users indeed do not care about technologies or APIs.
They care about great experiences.
Twitter does not excel at great experiences. If they did, third party clients would not have to exist.
Since they do, 23% of Twitter users choose to consume the network via superior-to-them, third-party offerings. Twitter has signed the death warrant of those products. Craigslist would be a valid counter-argument had it been initially built on the strength of third-party clients and then killed them. (PadMapper doesn't count, before you bring it up. It came to craigslist after dominance, not before.)
Twitter, on the other hand, has two native clients that began their very lives as third-party products.
We'll see. Maybe Twitter will be just fine after taking their most engaged users and sending them elsewhere.
Or maybe the users will follow their tech-savvy friends to a better experience, which again, isn't a hard category to trounce Twitter in.
TL;DR: one of your favorite twitter clients doesn't see most of this being a problem for a couple years --- and even then, they imagine there will possible routes for them to take when that time comes. Granted, they may be misunderstanding their relationship with twitter, but they really do sound optimistic.
It doesn't acknowledge the worry of newcomer developers to the twitter ecosystem, but I feel that we've been doing a good enough job of speaking to the doom and gloom here on HN. (Edit: See lukifer's comment. Excellent example of one of the difficulties that new apps will face)
I'm feeling the same disdain about committing to Twitter. I launched http://socialgrapple.com/ a few weeks ago--a social graph analytics product built on the Twitter API, and I'm pulling a bit of revenue already (a dozen paying customers). Now I have two choices: I have some wicked ideas of how to expand further on the Twitter API and provide even more value to customers who have expressed clear demand, or do I try and diversify onto other platforms to avoid getting bulldozed.
I know I can build a better and more valuable service with less effort by continuing to build on the Twitter platform. My developer instinct says "do it" but my business instinct says "forget the opportunity and diversify somehow." Diversifying is tricky because the graph mechanics on Facebook aren't the same, it seems the value of this intelligence is lower. Only other relevant market I can think of is something to do with SEO/web search terms vs domains.
I also know Twitter is building an internal analytics product, based various leaked screenshots, to complement their business model (tracking tweet impressions) but luckily it seems there's no overlap with what I'm building... yet.
I don't mean to hijack this thread but it seems relevant and I would love some feedback.
--
On a side note, I wrote a post in another thread that questions the details about the recent shift in Twitter's spirit towards developers:
how many Twitter services do we need when no one can decide if we even need Twitter
Truer words were never spoken. True, there are many people who find Twitter eminently useful, but there are far more who can't seem to figure out what the hell it's for, and I suspect many at Twitter HQ of belonging to the latter group. There are a glut of startups right now that don't really do anything useful, but have had no problem getting funded. The investment model seems to have moven away from "where's the market going to be in 3-5 years" to "if we invest in a spaghetti website, a sailing-meets-geocaching website, a cake-delivery website, and a social media microblogging iphone app, then surely one of them will hit."
There's now 75k registered Twitter apps. You're not going to be successful making a generic client. Think bigger: there's plenty of room for success in other Twitter verticals.
(and boooo for the fake FUD headline)
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