At last, Twitter is building out its platform: with the purchase of Tweetie (pictured) it finally has its own mobile client.
But that doesn’t mean it’s about to start throwing its weight around or trampling on the very developers who have helped to make it a success, and some of the palpitations on the tech blogs are overdone. (You can follow the discussion on Twitter at #unionoftwitterapps.)
The fact is, the free-for-all around Twitter has been great for anyone who saw a chance to grab an audience by supplying essential services to the Twittersphere, but it has made things inconvenient and confusing for users.
If you want to shorten a URL to add to a tweet you have to use a service like Bit.ly. If you want to upload pictures you have to visit Twitpic. If you want to access Twitter from a mobile you need a client like Tweetie.
Particularly for a new user, this can be very off-putting. According to Evan Williams, many iPhone users went to the App Store to find a Twitter app and left in confusion when all they could find were third-party products.
Twitter’s minimalist approach was always as much a result of necessity as intent. As Biz Stone told us recently, it was so engrossed in the early days with trying to keep the lights on (and the Fail Whale at bay) that it was forced to leave everything else to others.
So the purchase of Tweetie, along with news of an app for the BlackBerry, is a sign that Twitter is ready to build out its platform, even if that means treading on a few toes along the way. Many of the developers who rushed in early should have been well aware that their biggest competitor would eventually be Twitter itself.
Twitter investor and fan Fred Wilson gave a foretaste of this earlier in the week when he predicted it would take over functions like URL-shortening and picture-uploading, leaving developers to move into new and higher-value applications.
The one long-overdue service most conspicuously absent from Wilson’s list, of course, was monetisation. Speculation was intense at South By Southwest that Twitter was ready to take the wraps off its advertising engine, and expectations have been rising again ahead of this week’s Twitter developer conference – but all the signs continue to suggest that Twitter is happy to take its time over this.
So what of the Twitter clients – things like TweetDeck and Seesmic – that currently account for 80 per cent of all tweeting? Is it only a matter of time before their audience is sucked back to an expanded Twitter.com?
Not necessarily. As long as Twitter exposes all of its new services through APIs, and as long as the TweetDecks of the world can devise UIs that build a fuller experience around using the service, they should be able to hang on. Integrating with other services like Facebook will also give them a way to add value. (This is what Loic Le Meur at Seesmic has to say about it: developers have to keep innovating, and not rely on Twitter alone.)
True, Twitter.com’s share of the audience should rise as it meets more of its users’ needs directly. But that looks like a necessary rebalancing that, if handled right, will only make the overall ecosystem stronger.
