How Twitter.com Plans to Get Its Mojo Back
Leave it to the blogosphere to over-react to a tweet. A recent message posted by Twitter engineer Alex Payne has led to speculation about changes coming to Twitter.com. Here's the message:
If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees use, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)So why is that little missive worth jumping up and down about? Because it indicates that Twitter, having shared its API with the universe, is now trying to get some of Twitter.com's mojo back. According to Twit Stat, less than 20 percent of Twitter activity occurs on Twitter.com itself, and many of Twitter's biggest influencers barely visit the eponymous website at all. If the Twitter ad platform is to work, it's going to have to focus on its own traffic, and the best way to improve that is to make it a better place to visit (and as Adweek points out, improve services like search.twitter.com, which may be central to Twitter's forthcoming ad platform).
So what do these other Twitter clients offer that is so much better than Twitter.com itself? As one example, Tweetdeck, which has about a 10 percent market share, allows users to manage multiple accounts at once. It also features columns to clearly display when users are mentioned, and the direct messages they have from individual users. It also has much easier ways for people to retweet and reply to tweets than Twitter.com. I've been using it for about six months now, and have been astonished at how much better Twitter is to use on Tweetdeck.
Services such as Tweetdeck are radically different than Twitter itself. With so little known about what the ad platform will be like, it's hard to say whether Twitter will be able to, or even want to, port its ad platform over to third-party clients, with which it would presumably have to split revenue. That puts more pressure on Twitter.com to take center stage back from some of the popular services that have been built around it--and not a moment too soon.
Previous coverage of Twitter at BNET Media: