Becoming the sole provider of the user-facing interfaces to your service so you can generate revenue is a good tactic for a service the scale of Twitter, but things start to taste sour with the added context of recently ousting the CEO and soon after trying to turn a quick buck in your own apps with things like annoyingly-pervasive trending topics (which are both sponsored advertisements and an annoying reminder of what mentally-13-year-olds everywhere are thinking).
While some folks have stepped up to Twitter’s defense on the topic of the dickbar, people voted with their app reviews against what they saw as a step back for a client that had a tradition of great design:
Twitter for iOS, #dickbar edition, is now at ★☆☆☆☆ × 1161, after two days in the hands of users.
It’s good to remain skeptical, so let me walk you through what went through my head after reading Ryan Sarver’s email to the Twitter Development Talk list, ostensibly telling all third party client developers to give up and go home:
Still, our user research shows that consumers continue to be confused by the different ways that a fractured landscape of third-party Twitter clients display tweets and let users interact with core Twitter functions.
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Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. 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.
While third-party clients do vary in their presentation, the ones I’ve used are all pretty intuitive. The people who are still confused by the simple concept of a tweet are not the users you care about if your concern is the quality of your service and its contents. They are who you worry about when you want more eyes on your ads.
Twitter’s appeal was that it allowed you to be (fairly) effective in insulating yourself from the noise of the internet by choosing who to follow, while avoiding the butthurt that comes with equating following to befriending someone, while being simple to understand without help.
We’ve grown from 48 million to 140 million tweets a day and we’re registering new accounts at an all-time record.
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According to our data, 90% of active Twitter users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.
As a student of statistics, this statement immediately sets off alarms. For a service which is already a household name, growth should not be a major goal. The quality of a service whose content is user-generated is the quality of its users, and the high quality users can not be assumed to be distributed across the different clients in the same pattern as the general populace. In fact, while I do use the official apps (and consider myself to be a quality poster), a full ⅓ of my carefully-chosen followees do not. The users that stand out most in my mind as fitting both “uses official clients” and “registers at an all-time record pace” are spammers. Assuming that Twitter has achieved market saturation, if new account registrations continue to get more frequent, they are facing a growing fight against spam which, for a publicly-available service, means spending more money to solve.
To make matters worse, spammers are not very good at noticing promoted trending topics and other ad-like revenue models, and they make quality users lose interest in the platform (though follow insulation helps mitigate this). The ad impressions lose their value, and a vicious cycle is created with one myopic strategy.
The only way to make a quick buck often enough to make a living is to be a venture capitalist, leaving a trail of used-up companies in your wake. And we’re watching it happen here.
(thanks to ars technica for the article idea, and Daring Fireball for the easy title)
