When news broke earlier this week that Twitter was going to launch its own “tweet button”, many were quick to predict the death of TweetMeme, which already provides similar badges to many websites.
But while the British start-up has ceded its own retweet button (750m served every day, until now), it has if anything emerged stronger, with a rare deal, to reach into the heart of the realtime Twitter “firehose” – and build a new set of services on top of the micro-communications service.
If TweetMeme’s positive spin on losing its most visible piece of marketing is right, and it’s got low-cost, preferential access to Twitter’s data, it sets a benchmark that TweetDeck, Twitpic, Bit.ly, TweetUp and many other third-party developers might hope to emulate, as Twitter sucks up features and applications previously provided by its ecosystem.
It’s not clear exactly what sort of contract TweetMeme has signed with Twitter. The bootstrapped Reading company has got at least payment in kind, if not cash in hand, for relinquishing its grip on the button market. Its preferential access to the Twitterverse was previously only afforded to the likes of Google and Microsoft, who are rumoured to pay millions a year to power their real-time search features. TweetMeme will first use that access for DataSift, its new service to help developers sort signals from the noise of tweets.
Nick Halstead, the straight-talking founder of TweetMeme, characterises it as the next stage of an existing relationship, after making several trips to Silicon Valley since launching its button last year.
“We have a great deal out of this,” he told the FT. “We have a fantastic relationship on data. They have been massively supportive of the new product. The button has never made us any money. We were running them because we wanted more links and growth for Twitter. We need Twitter to continue to grow for the ecosystem, for products like DataSift.”
A rising tide of tweets may lift all boats, but it hasn’t always been easy sailing for independent developers, as I learned at a discussion in London a few weeks back.
“It’s very dangerous territory, it’s not for the faint of heart,” said Jesse Engle, co-founder of CoTweet, a Twitter tool for marketers owned by ExactTarget. “When you build a business on somebody else’s platform you assume certain risks. Our approach was to work with Twitter as closely as possible. We moved the business from Pennsylvania to five blocks from them.”
At the same meeting, Mr Halstead admitted even larger players like TweetMeme could be left waiting for more than a week for answers to emails. But he said the media “overreacted massively” to Twitter’s incursions into the ecosystem. “Microsoft has always created spaces where it is the dominant player but allowed a playground [for developers],” he said. “It’s to do with the size of the marketplace. If the market is massive, people will always want variance.”
Iain Dodsworth, founder of TweetDeck, popular software for posting to Twitter, said there is at least now clarity about Twitter’s approach to its would-be partners. “The most painful thing was the jump from one to the other. Now it will be incremental things. If they come out with a desktop app, they come out with a desktop app, fine. The jump was the big thing – now we know where we all stand.”
