Photos – to be specific owning your photos – matter for both social networks, because analysing those photos can help provide marketers with more information about the specific products to target at people. The same rationale helps explain the latest episode in the war between Facebook and Twitter – the stand-off about whether Instagram (owned by Facebook) can display its photos on Twitter. So in the end it all comes down to money. From hereon, users will be pushed into accessing the service through its own website and apps, where the overall experience (for which, read: the prominence ads and featured tweets are given) can be more tightly-controlled. It’s seems pretty clear, on the basis of Twitter’s own description of its new API policy (the technical term for how it grants outside access to its service) that it intends in future to become more like Facebook. Which (and this is my own presumption) must have posed a problem for Twitter when it came to work out how to monetise its enormous userbase. Whereas with Facebook it’s immediately clear to advertisers what kind of exposure they can buy through the Facebook site, the precise nature of how ads show up in Twitter clients has always been less uniform. The problem is that this isn’t as clearly lucrative as Facebook’s model. What came first was the service, connecting you to other people, regardless of which client you accessed it through. Whereas Facebook’s user experience was focused on its website, in Twitter’s case the website seemed almost like an afterthought. For many, it was one of the service’s defining features. For most of its existence it didn’t even have its own software: you would either go to the Twitter website or you’d access it through Tweetdeck, Echofon or one of the other apps for your mobile and your computer. It provided the network through which people would send and receive tweets. When Twitter was set up, it liked to depict itself as an infrastructure – an “ ecosystem”. That’s a problem for some of us, although according to this calculation from Benjamin Mayo we only account for about a quarter of all tweeters.īut there is a deeper issue here, reflecting an identity crisis that Twitter seems to be going through. Twitter is effectively sending the message that users no longer have much of a choice in how they want to read their tweets. In Twitbot’s case, it was actually trying to minimise its userbase – something pretty unusual in the age of social media.Īnyway, why does all of this matter? Well, for one thing, it’s a worrying trend from the user’s perspective. That helped explain why Echofon was mothballing its Mac app, and why Twitbot was charging so much for its app: it was uneconomical for either company to continue without a radical change of business plan. The blogpost added that it would “require” companies with more than a million users (which is quite a few of the existing clients, based on the numbers of downloads from the iTunes and Google Play stores) to “work with us directly”. Amongst other new rules, once an application has exceeded 100,000 users and then doubles its userbase (something which can happen pretty easily given the scale of the Twitter usership (500m and counting)) it “will not be able to add additional users without our permission.” The short message is that in future Twitter is planning to place stringent limits on independent applications which, like Echofon and Twitbot, perform the same function as the company’s in-house Twitter client. How could any application be worth that much? The answer, it turns out, can be found on this rather wonkish but extremely important blogpost on Twitter’s developer site. The problem was that it was selling the thing for a frankly astonishing £13.99. The second clue came when I started to look for an alternative client, which in my case was Twitbot – an extremely well-regarded client for the iPhone and iPad which had just released an application for the Mac. So it was with some horror and a touch of disbelief that I read the abrupt statement from the company that makes Echofon, Naan Studios, saying it would be shutting down the desktop and Firefox versions of its app. The reason I use Echofon, by the way, is quite simple: as far as I’m concerned it’s far better than the in-house app: it’s snappier, it offers more features, it’s more intuitive, more flexible, more convenient and less clunky than the official application. The first clue was a blogpost from the company behind Echofon, the application I used to access Twitter on all of my devices. It was a few months ago that I first realised something odd was going on in the world of Twitter.
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