Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: twitter

  • Twitter’s discordant note

    Twitter’s discordant note

    It’s been a bad week for the social media service Twitter with its stock pounded after the leak of poorer than expected results.

    Writer Matthew Ingham says Twitter lost its way five years ago when it started closing down access to third party developers, a move that hurt the service’s growth and user adoption.

    Twitter’s move was greeted with disappointment at the time and many developers gave up working on the company’s APIs.

    With the growth of third party applications stunted, there was little reason for new users to come on board and so Twitter is now disappointing the market with its results.

    Basically Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and his team reaped what they sowed in restricting access; they kept control of their data but it’s cost them users and hurt their share value.

    Twitter’s woes show that the economics of  cloud and social media services reward business that share data. While there may be some commercial and legal limits to what information can be shared, the default position should be to make data available.

    In an information rich society, those who contribute the most get the rewards. This is the point Twitter’s management missed.

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  • Building the closed internet

    Building the closed internet

    One of the great strengths of the social and cloud business model was the idea of the open API, recent moves by Twitter and LinkedIn show that era might be coming to an end.

    This week Nick Halstead, the founder and CEO of business intelligence service Datasift, bemoaned his company’s failure to negotiate an API access agreement with Twitter that restricts their ability to deliver insights to customers.

    Earlier this year LinkedIn announced they would be restricting API access to all but “partnership integrations that we believe provide the most value to our members, developers and business.”

    Monetizing APIs

    Increasingly social media and web services companies are seeing access to APIs as being a revenue opportunity – something many of them are struggling to find – or as a way of building ‘strategic partnerships’ that will create their own walled gardens on the internet.

    For developers this is irritating and for users it restricts the services and applications available but it may turn out to backfire on companies like LinkedIn and Twitter as closing down APIs opens opportunities for new platforms.

    A few years ago industry pundits, like this blog, proclaimed open APIs will be a competitive advantage for online services. Now we’re about to find out how true that is.

    One thing is for sure; many of the companies proclaiming their support for the ‘open internet’ are less free when it comes to allowing access to their own data.

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  • Daily links – Twitter founder on social media, teenagers online and tech employment

    Daily links – Twitter founder on social media, teenagers online and tech employment

    Links today have a bit of a social media theme with Twitter co-founder Ev Williams explaining his view that Instagram’s numbers don’t really matter to his business while researcher Danah Boyd explains the complexities of teenagers’ social media use.

    Apple’s patents and why the tech industry is firing, not hiring, round out today’s stories.

    Feel the width, not the quality

    Twitter co-founder Ev Williams attracted attention last month with his comment that he couldn’t care about Instagram’s user numbers, in A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep he explains exactly what he meant at the time and why online companies need to focus more on content and value.

    Apple gets patent, GoPro shares drop

    One of the frustrations with following the modern tech industry is how patents are used to stifle innovation. How an Apple patent for something that seems obvious caused camera vendor GoPro’s shares to fall is a good example.

    Why is the tech industry shedding jobs?

    Despite the tech industry’s growth, the industry’s giants are shedding jobs. This Bloomberg article describes some of the struggles facing the tech industry’s old dinosaurs.

    An old fogey’s view of teenagers’ social media use

    Researcher Danah Boyd provides a rebuttal of the story about young peoples’ use of social media. “Teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background,” she says. Sometimes it’s necessary to state the obvious.

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  • 2015 and the internet of desperate valuations

    2015 and the internet of desperate valuations

    2015 will feature more boneheaded moves as over valued companies try to meet investors’ expectations, a good example is Twitter adding sponsored accounts to its lists service.

    The move by Twitter, reported by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, is another attempt by the service to get revenues that justify the company’s ten billion dollar valuation. While adding little income, the move further erodes trust in the service.

    Illustrating the investment mania home delivery service Instacart announced it had raised $220 million, an amount that values the company at two billion dollars.

    That home delivery services are again the investment flavour of the time is a worry given similar stakes marked the peak of the first Dot Com Boom in 2000. Whether today’s equivalents are any more sustainable will be one of the questions for 2015.

    Another question for 2015 will be whether Twitter can crack the magic code and justify its valuation.

    Happy New Year.

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  • Market share isn’t everything

    Market share isn’t everything

    Recode’s Walt Mossberg looks at the mobile phone industry with the observation that while Google’s Android system is dominating the market, all is not what it seems.

    While Android’s market share is impressive, Apple still has the profitable high end of the market and Google’s is increasingly finding that low end smartphone manufacturers are prepared to run with the slimmed down Android Open system rather than submit to Google’s licensing requirements.

    Just as Apple can be fairly relaxed about Google’s position in the smartphone market, Twitter’s Ev Williams dismissed concerns around his service after the news Instagram had passed the 300 million user mark.

    Fortune’s Erin Griffith reported Williams’ feisty response: “If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant. It’s at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter—important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.”

    As Griffith observes Wall Street doesn’t share Williams’ view and that’s an increasing problem for the company, but both Apple’s and Twitter’s view to their market position illustrates how sheer numbers don’t necessarily matter.

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