How will the new Twitter Effect You? [updated]

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Former Twitter engineer and BankSimple co-founder, Alex Payne, wrote an excellent piece of his thoughts on the Twitter.com redesign, monetizing, and tweets as a medium.

The new twitter.com (of which, I confess, I’ve only seen screenshots and haven’t yet used) is absolutely beautiful and looks to increase usability ten fold. I look forward to using it. It also has implications that are more than skin deep. This is a look at new Twitter’s effects on all its stakeholders: users, developers, shareholders and potential business partners.

Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers… and Users

I think #newtwitter… [turns] the site into a rich information discovery platform, if you’ll excuse the buzzword bingo. The new design is a pleasure to use, and encourages a kind of deep exploration of the data within Twitter that has previously only been exposed in bits and pieces by third-party applications. Browsing Twitter is now as rewarding as communicating with it.

Previously, developers took data out of Twitter and into the context of their own applications and services. The new design flips this on its head, bringing rich embedded content into the site from a host of brand-name web properties.

It seems that Twitter has always looked at their users, developers and their habits and innovations, and considered which ones to fold into their own service; lists, trends, search and retweeting to name a few. With this new twitter.com update, Twitter has not only made common functions more accessible and less intrusive, but it has also wholly embraced url embedding (and shortening) and brought it to the next logical level: previewing.

Is Twitter leeching of their developers hard work? Is it fair to the developers? I believe the answers are “yes.” Developers enjoy access to a large Twitter membership and an ever-growing database of tweets, which in itself has remarkable ramifications on recording historical events and communication in general. In turn, developers should expect that their ideas in manipulating that member-base and information is open to be copied, just as a car company expects a new safety feature may be copied by a rival. “Great artists steal,” right?

Twitter doesn’t just have the right to make their own web interface richer, they have a responsibility. This responsibility is not just to their stockholders, but to their users as well, because building the richer web experience makes the whole platform–the company, the developers, the API, and the medium–move forward and use it in more interesting and productive ways. Developers should look at the new twitter.com not as a threat or a blow to developer relations, but as a challenge to their abilities instead.

Business Cases and Revenue Models

Above that, the new twitter.com seems to point to efforts that go beyond interface tweaks and might even shed light into its efforts into creating a more revenue-generating business organization.

There are many possible sources of revenue for Twitter. Among them, advertising, businesses users, the Suggested Users list, and real-time web statistics. With more of Twitter’s users going to twitter.com as their standard Twitter client, the new UI has implications on all of these revenue sources.

Advertising:

One of the striking things about #newtwitter is how clearly it’s designed to allow room for advertisements and promotions.

Selling ad space has never been a sure bet, especially when you’re a content provider and not a search engine. Regardless, advertising is the first and easiest-to-implement option for Twitter make money. The two-plane design and clear delineations between tweets (utilizing box lines)makes it easier for twitter.com to include advertising in ways that are eye-catching, yet unobtrusive and clear.

(Have you noticed that advertising is also the easiest way developers can make money off the same content?)

Business Users:

This is the most exciting possibility to me.

Business are beginning to realize that social media can be a powerful marketing tool. Currently, though, business are only using it as users. They build a following, communicate and monitor tweets with certain keywords, like their business name or those related to their industry.

Imagine a paid account UI where businesses can follow not only related tweets and keywords, but also trends on keywords, positivity, negativity, follows, retweets, mentions and more. Social marketing would have new meaning.

The new twitter.com represents the real possibility that twitter.com can be portal for business functions and communication, instead of those that third party developers have already conjured.

The Suggested Users List:

Twitter’s “Suggested” list may begin to gain more mindshare as more Twitter users look to it to grow their feed. Sure, many users already look to it when they initially sign up for the service, but what will happen when it is more accessible to veteran users?

It has been suggested that Twitter could offer up a slot on the list for money. Ethical? Probably not. Business smart for Twitter? Probably not. Business smart for businesses? Maybe. Smart for celebrities? No.

The Real-Time Web:

Many competitors have their hand on the pulse of the real-time web, including Digg, Facebook, and Delicious. But none of them nor Twitter really make any money off of it. Can Twitter make money off real-time web statistics? Now that they have critical mass, I believe they can.

Imagine any of these companies making a deal with Google Search or Microsoft Bing, and identifying keywords are trending at any one moment to figure out which ads to show (on Google Search or Bing) where and when.

Imagine mining keyword trends to identify which keywords businesses should to buy on ad networks or which markets to target. This would bring new effectiveness to not just digital advertising, but to advertising in general.

Twitter, more than any of their real-time web competitors, is in the position to capitalize on such partnerships and data mining.

Of course, all of this would go away and be in the hands of Twitter developers if tweets as a medium were to be decentralized.

A large part of the reason I left Twitter was a fundamental philosophical difference that I couldn’t reconcile, either for myself or the company. I believe that Twitter as a medium is and should be distinct from Twitter as a business. Put another way, there’s an important difference between lowercase “t” tweeting and uppercase “T” Twitter, just as with democrat and Democrat.

With all due respect to Mr. Payne, I think that if Twitter was to decentralize tweets and the member-base, it would lose control over those aspects and the company would be forced to out-innovate their third party developers on the very platform they started. That sure is idealistic and it would help keep the forward momentum of the Twitter platform, but it would make it a lot harder for Twitter to make money, both short term and long term.

[UPDATE]: Was just switched on to the new twitter.com UI. As expected, I love it, and only reiterate my thoughts above.

Related Articles

• The Very Last Thing I’ll Write About Twitter (al3x.net)
• A Look at the New Twitter (gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com)