Why Twitter Should Stay Out of the App Business

waderoush writes "Twitter has come out with some impressive new tools this month — the Twitter app for iPhone/iPad on September 1, and the overhauled Twitter website, or #NewTwitter, this week. But Twitter is late to its own party, Xconomy argues today. #NewTwitter still lacks basics like photo uploading and URL shortening, and apps built by third-party developers like TweetDeck and Flipboard continue to provide more compelling ways to explore the information in a Twitter stream. While Twitter may finally be 'getting focused' on ways to achieve mass market growth, as former Twitter platform manager Alex Payne wrote this week, the company will have a hard time competing with its own developer community — and might do better instead to acknowledge, and focus on, the service's growing role as a general Internet utility."

Comments

Re:Hurt their own developers

[MrEricSir]

Twitter needs to focus on their core service. It frequently goes offline, like many social services did when their growth was faster than expected (Friendster, LiveJournal, etc.)

The lessons of other social networks should be a clue that focusing on infrastructure stability needs to be a priority. People will get used to a crappy interface -- just look at MySpace -- but will not put up with unstable service for long.

Waste of effort

[Pojut]

There are a number of great twitter clients out there for pretty much every platform that connects to the Internet. At this point, Twitter as a company would be better served spending their money in beefing up their infrastructure, staving off spambots, and various other back-end stuff. What's the point in them spending money and time to create an "official" client? How would that actually earn them any money, compared to improving the quality of their service?

Should be, "Why Twitter Shouldn't be a Business"

[istartedi]

I'm not just picking on Twitter here, honestly. In fact, *most* of what's on the Internet shouldn't be a business. Before the Internet was commercial, DNS was developed via the RFC process. If the Internet had been commercialized before DNS, how many commercial "IP namer" services would we have? Likewise, if SMS had been common before the Internet was commercialized, something like Twitter would likely have been developed via the RFC process. Tweets probably would have been archived via a distributed protocol. Remember USENET? There was a distributed posting and archiving system for messages of considerably longer length. It was all specified via the RFC process. What is Twitter, but USENET with a protocol that enforces a maximum message length, IDs users, and has a non-distributed posting and archiving mechanism?