"Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace."
Like others I tire of the dragging out Myspace as that guy who started on weed and ended up an incontinent meth addict in the gutter but the core of this premise is correct, the 'useful' part of Twitter is as an infrastructure.
Small digression, when I was at Sun we had pushed out NFS to anyone and everyone, it was completely 'open' in the sense that we published all the protocols and anyone could build a compatible clients. Since this was web 0.01 the only servers and clients were in the same building generally but still the easy access, the documented protocol, and a thousand flowers bloomed. You could get your implementation 'blessed' as being standard by coming to Connectathon and proving you could interact with all of the other approved implementations there. NFS is everywhere, available for nearly every compute platform. It was infrastructure.
At an important meeting on the future of NFS (and a new proposed product called "ONC plus" which would have per client charges, and strict licensing controls. I argued with Ed Zander (then president of Sunsoft) over the wisdom of changing the NFS model. The business development guys had computed that if everyone that was currently using NFS was paying just $10 per client per year for a license, SunSoft would be the most profitable part of the Sun Microsystems universe. I asked Ed if he knew how many people would run NFS if it were $10/client, he pointed to the bizdev projections, and I told him no, it would be exactly zero. Zero because nobody would pay money to Sun for a technology they were not sure would work (AT&T had tried that with their DFS product in System V), and they certainly wouldn't base a business that needed it if Sun could pull the plug at any time or raise the price. And finally, the whole 'Open' thing only worked when you allowed other people to play. As I recall he reminded me to stick to the technical decisions and leave making a business out of it to people who understood such things.
Twitter is Twitter because it is Twitter. That twisted circular definition captures that something simple and free caught the imagination of millions of people and became something greater than itself. It became an infrastructure. But unlike Cities or other large corporations which have a revenue stream to cover the costs of their infrastructure, Twitter does not.
And so they are in the throes of discovering what is, and what is not, a business opportunity in the Twitter universe. And that discovery process is painful, and prone to missteps. Seeing Myspace wheezing in the gutter I do not think they would make the same exact missteps, while they could end up irrelevant, they have more options. They do need to understand how people value them, and understand how much of that value is "them" and how much is their partners. That is a complex thing. A great example of that process is looking at their on again / off again 'firehose' pricing model.
I think they have a lot going for them, but they have to figure this stuff out, and quickly. Folks like Google and Apple and Facebook aren't going to just sit around and do nothing. Watching them walk through the minefield that is API handling should be instructive to anyone here who hopes to do the same at some point.
There is one thing that twitter and facebook have that no one else in the history of... well... anything i can think of.
> They have an unlimited product placement budget.
Every TV Show, News program, Commercial, Website, Company... places the "Go to facebook.com/ford" or "tweet us @nbcnews".
This results in billions of dollars of advertising and they need to pay nothing. This helped build both twitter and facebook. Google should figure out how to get this for Google Plus. Once they do they can expand as quickly as twitter and facebook.
A good comment but I think you have it backward. When NBC puts "tweet this story" in the HTML frame that isn't advertising for twitter per se, that is NBC hoping that you will give NBC free advertising by spreading awareness of a story around the web. When the Tahoe ski resorts say "Take Interstate 80 to Truckee" they aren't advertising I80, but they are causing a lot of traffic to be generated, and that traffic is going to cause road damage that needs repair.
This is what I mean by "figuring out their (Twitter's) value."
Imagine that their API is really a bunch of method calls into the Twitter 'object'. They could, as an example, make their simple API 'free' and as you tried to do more complex things charge for those things. Presumably they would structure it so that folks could make 'useful' twitter clients for free, but they would have to pay some price for making more full featured clients.
Of course the challenge there is that you can't really charge for features that can be built out of the free protocol stubs, because people will just scrape those free ones and get around your code.
Why did MySpace fail? Users are known to be sticky - they tend to stay with the same newspaper, brand of chocolate, chewing gum, household cleaning products and so on. But they are only sticky up to a point. If something is better by a sufficiently significant margin, then they will switch (or some will). You can keep those customers just by just matching your competitor's improvements. For many things, the pace of change is reasonably slow. Also, many people just like that specific taste (even if they don't think it tastes as nice - like Coke and New Coke). There is some change (e.g. sugar-free gum), but it's easy for the leaders to keep pace. Perhaps in some cases, the scope for possible improvement is less than the margin needed for users to switch - so you ever fail.
MySpace had that huge advantage of many sticky users, but they stopped improving it, and a competitor (Facebook) made an improved experience.
Twitter is safe for as long as there isn't a sufficiently better competitor - "better" being in terms of the benefit to users, not any engineering quality in itself.
MySpace grew from music. Every single band was MySpace—all of them. This is what they leveraged to go from Friendster-level early adopter popularity, to mainstream youth popularity. This was huge, but they never got past this because MySpace always felt like an Internet underbelly sight. For the same reason that 50 years ago, grownups did not spend hours gabbing away on the telephone like teenagers, MySpace could never make inroads into the 25+ market segments.
Facebook rolled through phase 1 by being exclusive, then phase 2 by first saturating college students, then they exploded beyond what any social network had ever known by offering a clean, curated and controllable experience that steadily roped in older people by being the place to stay in touch with younger friends and family.
I always laugh when people trot out MySpace as a cautionary tale for Facebook, because it's irrelevant. MySpace was the 500lb gorilla in 2004, but Facebook is the only 5000lb gorilla that ever existed. Whatever bring them down won't be for the same reasons that MySpace failed.
People joined Facebook because they could connect to all their old schoolmates on Facebook. And this was because they started out as a school network. Myspace would have failed even if they kept improving it, if that one feature was missing.
But aren't those "free ads" a result of their large userbase, not a cause? I think FB and Twitter were already very big and influential before those started popping up.
Facebook definitely had a large user base, but twitter was still relatively small. Also for the mass market, you need advertising and reinforcement of the product. The free product placement through traditional media has given both facebook and twitter that for free.
Like others I tire of the dragging out Myspace as that guy who started on weed and ended up an incontinent meth addict in the gutter but the core of this premise is correct, the 'useful' part of Twitter is as an infrastructure.
Small digression, when I was at Sun we had pushed out NFS to anyone and everyone, it was completely 'open' in the sense that we published all the protocols and anyone could build a compatible clients. Since this was web 0.01 the only servers and clients were in the same building generally but still the easy access, the documented protocol, and a thousand flowers bloomed. You could get your implementation 'blessed' as being standard by coming to Connectathon and proving you could interact with all of the other approved implementations there. NFS is everywhere, available for nearly every compute platform. It was infrastructure.
At an important meeting on the future of NFS (and a new proposed product called "ONC plus" which would have per client charges, and strict licensing controls. I argued with Ed Zander (then president of Sunsoft) over the wisdom of changing the NFS model. The business development guys had computed that if everyone that was currently using NFS was paying just $10 per client per year for a license, SunSoft would be the most profitable part of the Sun Microsystems universe. I asked Ed if he knew how many people would run NFS if it were $10/client, he pointed to the bizdev projections, and I told him no, it would be exactly zero. Zero because nobody would pay money to Sun for a technology they were not sure would work (AT&T had tried that with their DFS product in System V), and they certainly wouldn't base a business that needed it if Sun could pull the plug at any time or raise the price. And finally, the whole 'Open' thing only worked when you allowed other people to play. As I recall he reminded me to stick to the technical decisions and leave making a business out of it to people who understood such things.
Twitter is Twitter because it is Twitter. That twisted circular definition captures that something simple and free caught the imagination of millions of people and became something greater than itself. It became an infrastructure. But unlike Cities or other large corporations which have a revenue stream to cover the costs of their infrastructure, Twitter does not.
And so they are in the throes of discovering what is, and what is not, a business opportunity in the Twitter universe. And that discovery process is painful, and prone to missteps. Seeing Myspace wheezing in the gutter I do not think they would make the same exact missteps, while they could end up irrelevant, they have more options. They do need to understand how people value them, and understand how much of that value is "them" and how much is their partners. That is a complex thing. A great example of that process is looking at their on again / off again 'firehose' pricing model.
I think they have a lot going for them, but they have to figure this stuff out, and quickly. Folks like Google and Apple and Facebook aren't going to just sit around and do nothing. Watching them walk through the minefield that is API handling should be instructive to anyone here who hopes to do the same at some point.