
Twitter's Analytical Business Plan - Anon84
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/14/twitter-analytics-business-technology-ebiz_0215_twitter.html
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axod
How exactly are they going to sell analytics, when they have a completely open
API?

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colins_pride
I agree it doesn't make much sense with the current setup. But if twitter did
decide they really wanted to sell twitter analytics, would you want to be
competing head-to-head with them? Open API doesn't have to mean replicate-our-
whole-database.

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dmolnar
Exactly. In particular the API is rate-limited, even for whitelisted users.
[http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#RateLimiti...](http://apiwiki.twitter.com/REST+API+Documentation#RateLimiting)

This makes it hard to build your own analytics service. The XMPP "firehose"
would help, but it is only available to specific partners, as well. While part
of this is for scalability and performance, it offers Twitter a way to screen
what sort of services people build on top of the data stream. So if they
didn't like an analytics service as a competitor, they could just turn them
off.

There's integration with gnip as well, but I don't know what the exact
features or limitations it has. Again, though, that feed is controlled by
Twitter, so they could perhaps direct gnip to cut off a service they don't
like.

If you're curious, there are periodic discussions at the Twitter development
google group on the effect of API limits. Sometimes these include ideas for
reducing the number of API calls required to do something:
<http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk>

That being said, Twitter has enough capital to acquire companies. Summize is
now search.twitter.com, for example. Would not be surprised if some of that
most recent $35MM is earmarked for buying companies that provide the next
"big" twitter-driven service, whether that's analytics or something else. I'd
guess they would try to go that route first, rather than take the bad PR from
terminating a competitor.

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sam_in_nyc
If I were Twitter, Twitturly would be in my scope.

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dmolnar
Yes, I think Twitturly is interesting as well, although it has not yet made it
into my list of things to check every day. It is the kind of site that might
make sense to acquire.

That being said, Twitter had an opportunity to buy Twitturly recently -- the
author was trying to sell the site. As I understand it none of the offers met
his reserve price. So does that mean Twitter wasn't interested (or wasn't
aware), that they are interested but are waiting to see if it takes off, or
that the didn't have the cash at the time?

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sam_in_nyc
Same here, I don't check it daily. Rather, I do cross references with things I
read on Reddit/Hackernews. It's interesting to see who the first people to
tweet about something that becomes popular are.

The downside about Twitturly is that nearly every tweet is the same: the title
of the URL. There's less and less relevant information about URLs each time to
I check it.

It's a neat idea, but I don't think people are too hot for social media stuff
anymore, in terms of acquiring. There are hundreds of ways to get quality
URLs, and as far as I know, nobody has really proven it's _profitable_ to
provide those URLs. Albeit, sites have been acquired (Reddit, Delicious)
around the principle, but I think those days are gone.

I would love to be corrected though...

Where did you hear about the author putting it up for sale?

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dmolnar
So if the title of the story for the URL were more descriptive, you'd find the
site stickier? Do you think this is the kind of thing that could be sent to
Mechanical Turk?

For how I heard about putting it up for sale, I follow the author's twitter
stream, @jstrellner. He announced that Twitturly was for sale on 17 September
2008: <http://twitter.com/jstrellner/status/925586511>

Later he states that the offers didn't make the reserve price and he isn't
selling: <http://twitter.com/jstrellner/status/933884602>
<http://twitter.com/jstrellner/status/934021436>

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sam_in_nyc
Not so much the title.. it's just that most people that Tweet a URL tweet it
in this format: <title of URL> tinyurl.com/fdjsk ... or basically what I'll
call a "junk tweet"

I like Twitturly for two reasons: the aggregation of tweets, and what the
tweets themselves say. Reason #2 is getting less and less exciting, because
more and more people are using automated means to tweet URLs, which results in
the "junk tweet" as described above.

Thanks for digging up that stuff :)

Edit: On the front page, they do a good job of pruning out the junk tweets.
But clicking on a URL and viewing the full tweet history shows mostly junk
tweets. I'd very much like an option to hide that.

