

Ask HN: What this fact means about Twitter (and web-startups in general) - tzury

Twitter is a successful web service. Perhaps, I can say it is amazingly successful, this is nothing to be argued about.<p>Yet, it seems to be the only popular web service which require installation of third parties and sometimes desktop applications to power-use it. That is, using gmail within your native mail client (via POP/SMTP) is nothing comparing to the gmail client itself. Same applies to youtube, facebook, friendfeed, and any other one you can think of.<p>Those services are all shipped with a well invested web client that evolves and renew itself once in a while. Twitter.com on the other hand, is becoming a mass, or perhaps useless, if you want to follow more than 25 people. tweetdeck seems to be far better client than twitter.com<p>This support PG's claim that twitter is a protocol, not just a web application or a web service. As such, we can treat it as torrent or any other protocol/hub.<p>But the point I am trying to make is that we might should look at web startups from different angle. In an era which everyone is willing to move into the cloud, perhaps one should focus about infrastructures and APIs and not on a rich client development, leaving the clients and apps to the echo-system which would built around the core service.<p>I refer to twitter.com as a demo application for the twitter capabilities, and not the the "twitter". this distinguish between twitter and twitter.com is astonishing to me, and I would be glad to hear more opinions about this.<p>love you all,<p>Tzury
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jdietrich
Facebook revenue (2009): ~$650m

Twitter revenue (2009): ~$4m

Twitter just don't seem to have a business model. They're making a paltry
handful of cash from sponsored tweets and a slightly larger handful from the
Bing deal. Beyond that, they don't seem to have much of a plan. I don't see
how you can effectively monetise a platform like Twitter. It smacks of bad old
bubble era thinking. Great protocol, great community, great service, lousy
business.

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nedwin
"they don't seem to have much of a plan"

Considering Evan William's success with Blogger and Jack Dorsey's early
success with Square I think it would be disingenuous to think that they don't
have plan just because they're not broadcasting it.

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andrewtj
If memory serves Evan Williams had to fire everyone including himself in the
process of getting Blogger to the break-even point; a point that it reached
only a few months prior to it's sale to Google. He seems like a resilient guy
but it doesn't seem like he has any exceptional ability to generate profits. I
don't know Jack Dorsey's back story so I can't comment there. Can you explain
your thinking?

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elbenshira
I agree, for the most part. More and more webapps are providing APIs for 3rd
party developer. And why not, right? It benefits everyone.

But I think Twitter understood from the beginning that they didn't need a
super awesome native client. Why would they? We were blasting 140 character
messages around, mimicking the way we text from our phones. Their core client
device was, and still is, the mobile phone.

But consider Facebook, which is generally more complicated than Twitter. If we
had to deal with competing, unpolished 3rd party clients from the beginning of
Facebook, I don't think Facebook would have taken off. In this case, it's good
that Facebook controls the experience; it's a complicated one.

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dirtyaura
I think importance of owning UI/UX has been underestimated lately because
importance of APIs and 3rd party ecosystem has been recognized. Especially in
mobile space, many investors seem to suggest that don't concentrate building
UX, but outsource it to 3rd parties by creating good APIs.

I'm not convinced that this is the right approach as UX really defines what
your service is about. Twitter might be an outlier here, it's a rare startup
that is succesfully operating mainly in protocol space.

Many other successful services are owning their main UX. E.g. Facebook,
Dropbox, Foursquare, 37signals products to name a few. They have APIs and it's
clear that those provide real value, but core experience is still defined by
their UIs.

Now that we are starting to have open source or inexpensive scalable solutions
for backend, developing good UX is actually becoming the hard part. If you
outsource this hard work to 3rd parties without providing great financial
opportunities for them, you are actually not providing value .

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jhuckestein
Tzury, I absolutely agree with you. The power of Twitter certainly lies in
their API.

To many other posters here: Twitter does have a strategy. At this year's Chirp
the Twitter exec team and Ev Williams in particular struck me as being very
strategic and thoughtful about their progress. Promoted Tweets in combination
with their position as a channel (and not a tool) are a powerful and
economically promising combination. And this is only one of their three
pillars of monetizations. IIRC the other two were not disclosed.

Another note: A company can only develop technology so fast. Twitter is
currently growing by a couple of employees every week and soon they will have
the resources to address many of the points mentioned here.

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tlack
I've been thinking about this for some time but you put it into words very
well. However, I'd like to suggest that Twitter is more than a protocol;
Twitter is a decent protocol and a great, huge user base. It's more than the
sum of its parts I'd say.

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matth
I think this goes hand in hand with the mantra, "Do a few things, and do them
right."

~~~
jonpaul
Bingo. They are taking it slowly and it seems to be paying off. I mean, shit
they didn't even have an official mobile Twitter client until recently. I use
to be so critical of them, but I think they get it, but they want to be sure
that their users don't feel like they 'sold out.' They want to actually
provide values in their services and the way that they monetize.

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BerislavLopac
My take on this: [http://berislavlopac.tumblr.com/post/615858128/the-future-
of...](http://berislavlopac.tumblr.com/post/615858128/the-future-of-web-
browser)

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chc
You might say Twitter's success is unarguable, but 37signals are arguing it
all the time, and pretty convincingly IMO. The term "success" has a pretty
specific meaning in the context of a business — "highly profitable" — and
Twitter does not fit that definition very well.

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AlexBlom
Depends how you look at things I guess. Without simplifying the discussion
Twitter's value is in the stream and data they generate, not their userbase.
Having encouraged an ecosystem this is a conscious choice they now seemingly
want to rectify.

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thunk
A better question might be "What other protocols are we missing?"

~~~
zackattack
payment protocol.

