
What Is Twitter’s Problem? No, It’s Not the Product - dwynings
http://gigaom.com/2011/03/08/what-is-twitters-problem-no-its-not-the-product/
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dasil003
This article makes some great points, but the bigger question is "Does Twitter
have a problem?"

All of this silicon valley hand-wringing is a tempest in a teapot. Twitter is
a company built on the backs of early adopters and its developer community to
be sure, but where do they go from here? A bunch of whiny and entitled nerds
chomping at the bit for the next big thing do not a market make. Twitter's
gonna piss people off, and they're gonna have to if they ever want to
monetize.

Granted this could kill the golden goose, but that's a risk any unprofitable
company with a useful product faces, especially one as revolutionary as
Twitter. Thinking about business models earlier is no guarantee of better
results. On the one hand they might have been clearer communicators and pissed
people off less down the line; but on the other, they might have failed to
base their business model on the ultimate potential of the company, or worse
yet, created a stillborn product that no one ever heard of.

As far as I'm concerned they played their cards right; whether Twitter will be
a success as a business remains to be seen.

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jsz0
If they continue to make small changes spaced out over longer periods of time
they'll be fine. No matter what they do a good number of people are going to
declare their hatred for it but these type of people tend to burn themselves
out pretty quickly because there's always something new and exciting to
declare hatred for. Ironically Twitter is a great outlet for Internet hatred
so of course these folks aren't going anywhere. Not their opinions don't
matter just that they are a poor barometer of how normal people react to
change. If it's gradual most people just accept it and move on with their
lives. You just can't overwhelm people with too much change at once.

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alexjawad
Excellent and highly topical article! I especially like this statement "The
features and product evolution are the fun part of the startup, and thinking
about possible ways to make money can be soul numbing."

It's indeed a dilemma, choosing between the product-centric and business-model
thinking. The coolest imaginable features may not always be easy to cash on,
why a second (or even a third..) best version oftentimes ends up being
launched.

Managing to merge both the your best version product and best way to monetize
is critical, and in the end what entrepreneurial creativity is all about.

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adrianwaj
I didn't read the article but I'll tell you how Twitter can become profitable,
and I feel somewhat qualified to say this, given Twitter (and others) have
emulated my own site (<http://twitya.com>) in more ways than one over the last
couple years.

Search advertising: so I run a search within the web client.. why isn't there
advertising on the right hand side?

Rev share with Tweeters: the tweeters bring traffic to Twitter, so how and
when will they be rewarded beyond just having free usage of the system?
Twitter should have buy-a-tweet and offer rev-share to those who select to use
it. The key is relevance - they need to insert tweets that people will want to
read. The tweets can even go in the right column. Or, they can go in stream,
immediately under the tweets from the users who have opted-in. If the viewer
doesn't like the ad tweet, they can unfollow that account of the tweet, to
which the ad belongs. The web interface can limit the number of ad tweets a
timeline has seen over the course of a day.

\-- so accounts get a new metric beyond followers, following, listed, created,
etc -- "ad intensity" based on some ratio of ad tweets/normal tweets/time.

\-- additionally, you can have power users pay a fee to not see the ad tweets,
or some percentage of them, and that becomes another metric in the API for a
user: "% ads being blocked." Then there can be some interesting configurations
options, like trading ad-insertions for ad-blocking.

Power client: why doesn't Twitter have power-client version of their web
interface, with multi-account capability? OK, some people will get it for free
elsewhere, but not everyone.

