Will Twitter’s Revenue Plans Ruin the User Experience?
If you’re one of Twitter’s 140-plus million users, or just a general fan of social media, you may have recently noticed a few Twitter-related peculiarities. Like the fact that LinkedIn’s Twitter integration has been limited. Or that both Tumblr and Instagram users have been blocked from finding their friends on Twitter. As The Verge’s Senior Mobile Editor, Dieter Bohn, explains, this is all part of Twitter’s grand plan to maximize revenue.
Twitter’s recent actions represent but the first salvo in a burgeoning war against anyone seeking to independently profit off the social-media giant: be they fellow social-media networks or 3rd party developers. More specifically, they’re early manifestations of the changes Twitter is making to its API–its programming interface–changes which may severely pinch the profitability of independent developers.
On the surface, Twitter has good economic reasons to change it up. For one, it doesn’t make much business sense for Twitter to provide Tumblr or Instragram open access to its “follow graph”–a tool providing “near real-time analytics” of user interests–which Bohn says could “be insanely valuable.” Likewise, special features provided for free by 3rd party Twitter clients could potentially make Twitter oodles of money as premium features. And perhaps most importantly, Twitter’s nascent advertising strategy might be otherwise compromised.
Yet, we may wonder if Twitter’s interest in providing “a consistent Twitter experience,” one entirely mediated by the company itself, will eventually turn people away. The reason people use unofficial media-clients like Tweetbot or Tweetdeck, after all, is because they’re felt to increase Twitter’s functionality. Ad revenue may increase at first but it won’t persist if Twitter’s official user-interface has its users reconsidering Google Plus.
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