The Open Web is on Twitter’s Tail
Twitter has been a great phenomena these past few years. I’ve been able to enjoy a different mode of communication with old and new net friends. I’ve had fun experimenting with their API. I’ve enjoyed the discourse that has been ignited and fueled by Twitter’s successes and failures. And it’s been interesting to watch the evolution of it’s popularity… as it trickled into MSM as a simpler way for news television hosts/audiences to interact and broaden the conversation a bit. And seeing how eventually twitter entered into the lives of people who only a short while before would never have bothered using such a service. And we cannot ignore the convenience of the emerging Mobile Web, especially since the iPhone was released in 2007, which has been in direct parallel to Twitter’s own growth. A Perfect Storm.
We all know the technical struggles that Twitter continues to go through in trying to maintain a huge centralized messaging service used by millions of people and many 3rd party services that plugin to it’s API. But since gaining mass attention around the world, they are an undeniable global force in social networking. And they have enough money to rapidly fail, repair and improve. Twitter may eventually be too big to fail. Or at least fail totally and quickly. Sound familiar? That’s the recipe at this point. Unless The Open Web also continues to evolve and upgrade itself to modern day requirements and accessibility.
Twitter is not going away. At least not for years to come if they do at all. After all, we still have Friendster out there. I’ve made the snarky comment that twitter could be the next Friendster. That happens when competition catches on and catches up and the playing field balances. Except in this case, the competition is the Interwebs itself. RSS, Atom, Wave, and still old dinosaurs like SMTP. Injecting Real-Time into the Open Web has huge potential influence on some business plans…. like Twitter’s plan to be “The Pulse of the Planet” with a user-base in the billions.
I think back to AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe in the 1990′s. Email used to be contained inside those silos. Eventually, CompuServe was first I believe to host a relay server so that users could send and receive email across the Internet to non @compuserve.com addresses. I remember how big that was for me as I was able to communicate with my girlfriend’s .edu address using my CompuServe account. On the other hand, The Internet’s evolution did not help CompuServe survive. Note this quote:
“The wall we eventually hit was the opening of the Internet to general public use,” Lambert said. “When that happened, our own private network had diminished value. We no longer had a captive audience.”
Twitter is open. But they are centralized. Email is a distributed decentralized system. It would never work for the masses if it were centralized for technical and legal reasons. Twitter is currently a micro-messaging platform and serve a different use case. But both are messaging utilities. Email is far from perfect but Email has no single point of failure or single company responsible for running it. Email has no terms of service. Email is not a company. Twitter will be to micromessaging/microblogging as Google/Yahoo/Microsoft and every ISP is to Email. They are all providing Email services. Now we need MicroMessaging Service Providers on top of Open Protocols. This might not help Twitter just as the evolving open Internet did not help CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL at the time. But this is only in relation to it’s current incarnation. Twitter will have to evolve. In fact, it will start to resemble Facebook more over time. They need to reinvent to survive. Because the Open Web is relentless. The Real-Time Web is upon us and we don’t need to rely on any particular company to leverage it. Facebook seems to know this. And they have less to worry about. They have an enormous user base and a complete service offering. Twitter has very little to offer beyond it’s current mass appeal. And we all know how fast that trend can change. Friendster had it. Myspace had it. Twitter is enjoying it and may be blinded by it. Or not. They should be smart enough to grok this.
So looking forward, we’ll have our Real-Time RSS and other forms of Twitter clones. The blogosphere itself is getting rejuvenated. Meanwhile, Twitter has to deal with building anti-spam technology, security exploits, targeted attacks, infrastructure, legal issues and finding a path to profitability for all of its investors… a list that keeps on growing. And to all the companies thinking of signing deals with Twitter to run your microblogging business…. I would sit back and wait and watch how fast the Open Web catches up…. and you’ll see that you don’t need Twitter. You just need the Web. It’s getting better and faster and smarter. Save your money for data analysis, content re-purposing, archiving and analytic services
It looks like Twitter has raised another $100m. I think on the surface, it’s a mistake. On the other hand, the investment itself is strategic. Twitter spends money slowly. The investment almost works more to secure a valuation than it does to accelerate towards an exit strategy where investors profit. And in order to even scratch the surface of bringing in a revenue stream, they need to do things that users/developers won’t love. Ads. Restrictions. Throttling. Fees. Once it is seen that Twitter no longer offers a unique service and only really ignited a shift on the web towards microblogging and link sharing… users will start to migrate away. Or at least use other services in conjunction (cross-posting). This won’t happen overnight, but unless Twitter becomes something much more than what it is today….then it will just be a long slow demise. You might see some investors get impatient and get their money back as they abandon Twitter. You might see big mistakes along the way. It’s happened before. Twitter would not be unique in it’s failures. And the most notable concern for Twitter is it’s competition. Facebook, Google and even Microsoft and Yahoo are not going to make this easy. Not to mention the next phenomena in Internet startups. Some think that maybe it will be FourSquare and others to steal the limelight away from twitter. And if Twitter’s early adopters leave, they will be left with less valuable users in my opinion. Celebrities will even grow tired of it and move on. Nothing is secured.
The Open Web is on Twitter’s Tail…. And that’s not all they have to worry about.
Related posts: