While Twitter was Sleeping

There’s many things users would like to see improve with Twitter. Improved support for International mobile devices, reliability, a better UI, the list goes on. One thing we can deduce from the hundreds of applications that have been built by third parties using the website’s API, is that there are many people with great (entirely practical) ideas on how to improve the service.

Blogger/Developer Naill Kennedy recently spent a week rewriting the Twitter front end, optimizing it for standards and speed. In only a week he came up with some additions that I’d pay to see Twitter adopt: language localization, redesigned UI, geo distributed content, Ad-friendly layout, microformats and more. Surely in the past three years Twitter could have done the same, but it hasn’t. One has to start to wonder if the company isn’t just using the public to crowd source their R&D. Is that a business strategy? Not on it’s own.

A Twitter App Store

For a service that’s growing so fast and trying to scale up to meet demand here’s my question. Why doesn’t Twitter attempt to follow the model that Facebook and the iPhone are using? While Apple and Facebook crowd-source development so that the public improves the device they also buy, they’ve been smart enough to monetize that development. Facebook makes a tiny bit of money off applications. Apple takes a 20 to 30% cut off anything sold through their Apps store. It’s a model, I think the founders of everyone’s favorite micro-messaging service should seriously consider.

Twitter SAAS?

While Twitter was sleeping, a number of start-ups have sprung up with huge appetites ready to eat the companies lunch for breakfast. Yammer is all but trying to corner the corporate market, attempting to be the company that provides secure, internal messaging to large groups that don’t want anyone on their network who doesn’t work for them.

Meanwhile the people behind Laconi.ca recognized that one solution to scalability is federation. They’ve since built a completely open source micro-messaging application that also uses Twitter’s API to engage that community. They intend to charge to install, configure and customize their software for groups and companies that want to use. If you’d like to see it action, you can play around a bit with Appfrica’s laconi.ca server here.

What’s most intriguing to me is that both of these business models are things Twitter could have done two years ago to help monetize the service. Hell, they could still do both of these if they wanted to.

I’m almost certain Twitter will succeed beyond all expectations despite all of this, I just don’t see how it’s good business to leave so much potential ‘business’ on the table.

Check out Niall’s Awesome TwitterFE Rebuild