Twitter Launches “Twitter Certified Products” | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Launches “Twitter Certified Products”

techcrunch.com

48 pointsuptown39 comments

Looking at this as a complete outsider (and ignoring for a moment that the people running and backing Twitter are very smart and talented), Twitter's big-picture strategy seems rather similar to the plan hatched by the Underpants Gnomes of South Park[1]:

  Phase 1: Collect users and developers (with a free service)
  Phase 2: ?
  Phase 3: Profit

Twitter seems to be smack in the middle of that awkward phase 2: they have a lot of users and developers, and now they need to figure out how to leverage the valuable social graph they've acquired to build a profitable, sustainable, defensible business. That's NOT easy.

I wish them success.

[1] http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/151040/the-underpants-...

Maybe they should just start courting some of the big media companies. I'm sure neither Time Warner or News Corp wants to go back to the days when they had to fill airtime with real content instead of reading tweets.

Products like this are quite socially and economically valuable, and also require a great deal of capital investment to make work. When the investments demands quick return, then those who have to make it all work seem to start making decisions that end up removing most of that value.

So Twitter is quite valuable as infrastructure; but when they try to turn it into a product that they can use to return the investment, it ceases to be infrastructure and becomes less valuable.

The last sentence of this article has an obvious typo - it says "...the company argues that they don’t add enough value for its users." That sentence only makes sense if you replace "users" with "Twitter's bank account."

Agreed. Twitter needs to die already.

So does Facebook, and Myspace.

Does HN automatically hate any tech company as soon as it becomes successful?

we love github

for now

We have a love/hate relationship with Google and Apple. Does that count?

Sometimes we just don't like where a company is going or what it has done to try to actually cough make money. I think with Twitter it's watching what used to be a very open platform slowly, but surely, becoming yet another walled garden.

This. Using tools in creative and unexpected ways is what human beings are. When a service no longer permits that, it has officially made itself Part Of The Problem, regardless of how much money it's bringing in.

I think it's more that HN automatically hates any tech company as soon as it goes public, because going public tends to shift the company's focus from its users to its bank account. Decisions based on growing the latter almost always come at the expense of the former.

Is Twitter successful? Last I knew they still had no real path to profitability. They've got a bunch of people using something, but as far as I understand, it's just a drain, and now they're trying to figure out how to actually bring in some profit. I don't call things like that "successful".

They have been profitable since 2009, apparently (http://www.wired.com/business/2009/12/twitter-earns-first-pr...)

The key thing about things like Twitter and, especially, Facebook that makes them get such hate, I think, is that as a user, you are their product -- not their customer. They don't get money from you, so their interests are not aligned with yours. This leads to a lot of perverse behaviour in the interests of extracting value from your use of their site.

This is in contrast with other services (like Github, which someone mentioned), whose interests are aligned with yours. They want your experience to be good so that you continue to give them money.

^^This is a nice, clear, and level headed response.

Combine conflict of interest and lack of transparency, and you can explain a lot of problems.

HN is not a single mind. It's composed of different users with different opinions. Some like Twitter, others hate it, and some others like me are just very much indifferent towards it.

When there are thousands upon thousands of 'partners' integrating their API, how does a consumer, or a business, sift through that shit and find the gems?

How does Twitter even know about or be aware of apps that are either violating their terms (before or after any terms change), or are awesome and solve a unique problem?

They're big enough now that this is a required means of developer communication, verification, and management.

This applies to any platform after a good length of time and adoption. It probably should have come sooner-- it may have even better telegraphed their hand before the blog posts did.

I wrote this a little earlier regarding the announcement:

"Working toward the sustenance of some inexplicable business jargon? Fortunately for you, Twitter has yet to define a robust plan to subvert your work. So, to alay any budding concerns, you get a plucky blue badge for your product."

Ridiculous.

(http://one37.net/29/8/2012/twitter-launches-certified-produc...)

"Thanks for figuring out for us what monetizes and what doesn't!" -- Twitter (and Craigslist, apparently)

Imagine if MLB thought AAA ball was going to cannibalize its audience? What does that say about Major Leaugue's future?

Zuckeberg did the smart thing with IG, his just bought it ! (at 1% of his company value = NBD). Why doesn't twitter just roll-up some of the better products? And keep the collabritive ecosystem? Can they not "afford it"?

The valuation gap between twitter (at what $6-7B?) and its ecosystem players is so vast...something doesn't add up to why they should have such fear.

Tweetdeck had enough users before Twitter bought them that they could have started a competing service. And due to the loose nature of Twitter's social graph, it may have been just as useful to the users. I think that sent a scare through the company on the dangers of not being the touch point with the company.

Just hit google real quick, and found this headline on that Twitter Buys TweetDeck For $40 Million | TechCrunch I think you're probably right in terms of the mental framing...but, back of the envelope, 10x tweetdecks = 400m = 6% equity stake in Twitter $7B. Its not a bad biz model. Twitter has 2x orders of magnitude more mkt value. They should put that to work.[1]

[1] Or they dont, and/or cant issue shares anywhere near that price after the FB ipo collapse.

Their road map and this strategy cements the opinion that Twitter is a media company and not a social-networking platform.

The question each user of Twitter now has to ask themselves, how and why they are using Twitter on the daily basis.

As a business itself, Twitter is clearly providing an outlook into what it expects its user community to be, i.e, the users are the clear product to be sold to Twitter's customers and clients.

The old model of selling Ads to the free-users, no longer works. The free-users clearly need to be sold to the clients and customers as well.

So if you are a free-user as a business yourself, than you are in a good company at Twitter. If you are a free-user as a consumer (consuming content generated by others) than you are a product and you have to be ready to be sold. But if you are a free-user only trying to have social-conversation with friends and strangers, than you are an idiot interfering in other people's business.

There is nothing negative here, it just all makes sense.

From Failwhale to Stamp Of Quality in a few short years.

Twitter can't find profitability, but these companies can. Maybe Twitter can finally make a buck by taxing them?

The problem is that there's not enough money there. Twitter needs 12 - 13 figures, not the paltry 6-7 of these "partners".

Well, at least Klout didn't get a badge. That really would have taken the cake.

Does twitter have an in house R&D department not focused on improving twitter, but on exploring other options?

Haha, couldn't agree more! It is age of the marketers not the geeks, it seems. Dustin's comment made me remember it http://dcurt.is/twitters-graph

If I were running twitter, I would be moving towards making twitter more open. I would not stop until diapers could tweet that the baby needs to be changed. I would also hire every coder I could find and give them free will over what to develop and research. Then we would test all of the ideas on the incredible user base twitter has. There is no way they cant hit gold multiple times with such approach. But no, they prefer to "defend" their property. Twitter is going the way of yahoo. Sad.

IFTTT: If This Then Twitter

    if(twitter)
        R&D ? profit | break
    else
        print "one more round, people"

This maybe wild conjecture but I think the crux of the issue is that Twitter feels that developers of third-party apps "owe them something". After all, even before Tweetie the Twitter apps were generating profits for many small companies before Twitter generated any significant revenue.

The problem with Twitter is that they provide an infrastructure service without owning infrastructure but paying all the costs to provide it (aside from bandwidth consumed by users).

If Twitter's going to go with this API tokens implementation I think they should stop this love/hate relationship with third-party developers and tax them per token. As long as it's a reasonable fee and not prohibitive, third-party devs should be happy to pay. This 100,000 users cap is both arbitrary and prohibitive for startups targeting growth.

I think a lot of developers are looking at this in the wrong way. Twitter realizes its potential as a service. It has been used to topple governments in the last 5 years and to stage massive political movements. A lot has been changed thanks to Twitter's method of communication. In the past year they've hired multiple security experts and have begun making their product more secure (look at the patches to the Twitter client). I think their move to create licensed applications may not be as much for money as it is for security and having trusted sources. Lets face it, most applications you can't trust with your security. This allows Twitter to have a say in who meets their standards.

Steve Ballmer could offer some valuable advice to Dick on what's actually important.[1]

On a more serious note, am I the only one who suspects they're not satisfied with feed ads and want to drive more impressions on Twitter.com?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMU0tzLwhbE

Looks like a direct answer to the Facebook PMD program, even the badge qualifications are similar.

Why isn't Twitter taking these data analyses and enterprise targetted services and acquiring a service or two and developing them in house? It seems like they already do a lot of liaising with companies, and this is a solid extension.

Letting Twitter audit your company and plans and then shortlist you if you're doing something worth doing sounds like a great plan.

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