Comment by px1999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by px1999 | Hacker News Reader

I'm having trouble trying to figure out who Twitter's trying to target with these changes - and can't figure out if:

1. They want to corner the advertiser & business market - ie it's an attack on Hootsuite etc

2. They want to lock out competitors from pwning them on search (Google/Bing incorporating [good] twitter results into their searches would IMO be devastating to twitter - particularly if they didn't embed intents / hueg links to twitter everywhere)

3. They want to own the ecosystem so that twitter clients don't cross-post to Facebook/G+/app.net/favourite social network here

4. (I don't think this is likely) - Twitter thinking that they can somehow squeeze an extra couple of bucks out of each user if they're on an official client via advertising or something similar.

.

Each of these seems plausible to me, but all of them essentially involve twitter holding customers/data/users hostage which doesn't seem like a great strategy.

Is there some angle I'm missing here / reading too much into?

I was also trying to figure out the business rationale for this move. Their 2x2 chart gets us relatively close to understanding their strategy. Here's what it looks like:

- Twitter doesn't want to own analytics for business or consumer players. - Twitter doesn't want to own engagement for businesses. - Twitter DOES want to own engagement for consumers.

This seems pretty counter-intuitive to me. Since businesses are the ones who actually pay twitter cash, I would have expected them to try to own the whole left side of their chart, and leave developers to create new innovations for the whole right side of the chart. What would you have to believe in order for this to be a good idea? Some possibilities: - Twitter thinks that developers will ruin the consumer experience, slowing their growth. - Twitter thinks that businesses won't pay them unless consumers are tweeting on twitter.com - Twitter doesn't think that analytics or business engagement services will be lucrative enough for them to invest directly in. - Twitter thinks that if the developer community spends its effort in the top-right, it will distract the community from innovating in the other three quadrants, where Twitter wants to see more development to unlock more business-driven revenues (This one is a real longshot, but I'm trying to be comprehensive) - Twitter doesn't care about users tweeting or consuming tweets if they aren't on twitter.com (I'm still struggling to figure out why this is bad for twitter -- any thoughts, HN?)

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