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The mob rules Twitter. The rabble is Twitter’s prevailing guiding force. At least, that’s the gist of an extremely interesting and insightful article in this month’s Wired Magazine.
In Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter, author Steven Levy recants the tale of Twitter’s attempt to incorporate retweeting into its architecture. You see, the “RT” and @twitterhandle that signified a retweet (that is, a repost of someone else’s tweet) was entirely user created. The suits at Twitter had nothing to do with it.
So, when the suits tried to integrate retweeting into Twitter’s functionality, the users rebelled and began a grassroots campaign (complete with #saveretweets hashtag) to eliminate Twitter’s meddling because Twitter “didn’t make any provision for the commentary that users might like to add.”
This is not a wholly unpredictable event. Its users have long defined Twitter’s purpose. Users figured out what to do with it (as Twitter’s Biz Stone explained when announcing the retweeting function, “This is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be.”), users built the apps that make it better, and users have refined leetspeak to cram as much information in the 140 character limits. As the article states, “Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users invented baseball.”
So how will those users feel when Twitter stops being social media’s answer to socialism and starts behaving like a business? Will Twitter alienate its user base once they focus in on a business plan and perhaps take more contfrol over their offerings and service? And how do you control all those outside developers making apps and Twitter clients? How do you ensure they play ball with your new money-making methods? As the article points out, many user-created Twitter clients completely bypass the homepage.
It all reminds me of something Mark Cuban wrote on his blog earlier in the summer, in a posting titled, When you succeed with Free, you are going to die by Free.
The more important remaining successful is to management, the more money they will spend, the more chances they will take, the more infrastructure they will build, the more people they will hire. All of the things that will prevent them from staying lean , mean and flexible. All of the things that distract them from innovating within their core competency.
So what hope does Twitter have of making money when the users define its core competencies? Shouldn’t said users be entitled to a piece of the profit pie? And when they don’t receive their cut, or are limited by a increasingly rigid, profit-driven service, what then?
Tags: idealaunch, mark cuban, Twitter, wired
