Twitter developers should stop plugging holes
Fred Wilson laid out an interesting post at the Business Insider this morning. For those who don’t know, Wilson is a partner at Union Square Ventures and one of Twitter’s top investors. Wilson’s basic point was that current Twitter development focuses on plugging holes in the service, not creating new things with what the service can offer.
Consider this – not terribly long after Twitter launched people realized they needed a way to share long URLs in a compressed format. Along comes bit.ly with its URL shortening service. How bout TwitPic for sharing pictures. The examples continue from there. Point is, though, that none of these things take any sort of interesting advantage of the Twitter platform or concept. They’re just methods by which people share the shortened versions of information encourage by Twitter. As Wilson says it, these are things Twitter should have had built in to the service at launch.
Maybe you didn’t hear him correctly. These are things Twitter is going to do. Just like Facebook did with all of the crazy apps that just filled the gaps, Twitter will be rounding out its own feature set to compete with and provide the services of third-party developers. In some cases, as was the case with FriendFeed, that could mean acquisitions. Wilson didn’t say it overtly, but his message is loud and clear.
It’s time for developers to do something great, like the social gaming apps for Facebook. Analysts estimate social gaming will hit $1.6 billion in revenue next year, and Wilson thinks that number is too low. That’s a pretty nice pie to slice up.
Source: Business Insider