twitter’s ‘consummization’ bad for app developers?
GigaOM leads with rumors that microblogging service Twitter might acquire search engine Summize next week.
The blogerati love Twitter and really want to help it justify its own existence. Figuring out a business model for Twitter has become the blogosphere’s equivalent of the search for a cure to cancer. Central to the problem of a viable business model is really defining what Twitter is. Twitter has been defined variously as a personal publishing platform, a message bus and a utility. Each of these definitions lead to different possibilities for business models. Add in Twitter’s fledgling API (Twitter as a development platform?) and its abundant downtime and scaling problems (Twitter as a ransom-extractor?) and we have a whole load of ideas on how Twitter can make money.
Given that most of Twitter’s usage comes from its API, it is no understatement to say that building and maintaining a developer brand is important to the company. With respect to this goal, Twitter’s rumored acquisition of Summize is a step in the wrong direction. To be sure, Twitter will definitely gain from the dependable search features of Summize. But in general, Twitter has long defined itself as a neutral message bus that doesn’t examine the messages it carries. Implicit in this assurance is that it won’t get in the way of developers looking to build on its platform.
Not all companies making platforms need be in the position of competing with their platform developers. Whether or not a company is in such a position can be determined from what it says is the unique value its service provides. For example. the Facebook application platform is a way of leveraging Facebook’s unique data asset, a vast social graph populated by rich profile data. Twitter’s biggest data asset is knowing how conversation flows among its members, which can be a powerful determinant of user sentiment on a given topic at any time. A glance at the applications at Summize Labs shows that these are exactly the kind of value-adds atop the basic Twitter message bus that Twitter had absolved itself of earlier.
If this acquisition goes through, Twitter may gain a new core product and possibly a business model. It still amounts to Twitter backpedaling from its earlier statements and raises the possibility that Twitter itself will get into building applications that cannibalize its unique data asset. Sending such messages to developers building on its platform might lead them to look to other social media platforms, and that definitely can’t be good for Twitter.
Update: The Twitter blog now confirms that Twitter has indeed acquired Summize.
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