> Letting third parties do the hard work of experimenting with user acquisition and engagement, then buying up the best and turning their backs on the rest was a masterful move.
It would have been if you assume that Twitter could thrive on its own. Since they have historically relied on third parties to push their product forward, and then cut them off at the knee, they should have been prepared for the inevitable stagnation that followed, and perhaps they weren't.
The masterful move would have been to carefully augment the base functionality offered by Twitter while encouraging the third-party ecosystem to continue to grow and thrive.
You can see, for example, Apple do this with iOS (albeit at times with a ham-fisted approach) by incorporating some—but by no means all—of the features that third parties come up with into the base OS.
This encourages third parties to continue to participate in the ecosystem while gently nudging them towards innovating instead of stagnating, because that's the only way they will be able to compete with the “free” Apple-provided software and make money.
Twitter was in the somewhat unfortunate position that it was born as a wide-open system that had little in the way of walls, leaving the new management with few options to gain more control over their product but to start restricting what could be done with it.
Instead of recognizing the value of third-parties and commoditizing their complements, though, they went all-out and systematically alienated anyone who wanted to share in their good fortunes. They placed their focus on attracting celebrities and brands (remember when Ev was “excited” that Oprah was joining?) and attempted to create a friendly environment for the average consumer by tightly controlling the user experience.
In itself, I don't think that this is a bad idea—Facebook has done it quite successfully, for example. Twitter's problem is simply that they are about to run out of innovation to acquire because there are no more small timers left who are willing and capable to take a risk on their platform and come up with some unexpected new feature that could later be integrated into product proper.
It would have been if you assume that Twitter could thrive on its own. Since they have historically relied on third parties to push their product forward, and then cut them off at the knee, they should have been prepared for the inevitable stagnation that followed, and perhaps they weren't.
The masterful move would have been to carefully augment the base functionality offered by Twitter while encouraging the third-party ecosystem to continue to grow and thrive.
You can see, for example, Apple do this with iOS (albeit at times with a ham-fisted approach) by incorporating some—but by no means all—of the features that third parties come up with into the base OS.
This encourages third parties to continue to participate in the ecosystem while gently nudging them towards innovating instead of stagnating, because that's the only way they will be able to compete with the “free” Apple-provided software and make money.
Twitter was in the somewhat unfortunate position that it was born as a wide-open system that had little in the way of walls, leaving the new management with few options to gain more control over their product but to start restricting what could be done with it.
Instead of recognizing the value of third-parties and commoditizing their complements, though, they went all-out and systematically alienated anyone who wanted to share in their good fortunes. They placed their focus on attracting celebrities and brands (remember when Ev was “excited” that Oprah was joining?) and attempted to create a friendly environment for the average consumer by tightly controlling the user experience.
In itself, I don't think that this is a bad idea—Facebook has done it quite successfully, for example. Twitter's problem is simply that they are about to run out of innovation to acquire because there are no more small timers left who are willing and capable to take a risk on their platform and come up with some unexpected new feature that could later be integrated into product proper.