Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

There has been way too much chit chat recently about how Twitter doesn’t have a business model or that Twitter is going to take on Google. I’d be really annoyed of it all if I wasn’t so busy trying to juggle all of my tweet reading with my actual work. My thoughts are that these are the wrong questions to ask about Twitter. I’m pretty sure they folks at Twitter and their investors will come up with some legitimate revenue generating ideas, and I’m also rather convinced that Twitter isn’t going to put Google out of business. I think the real question to ponder is this:

Can Twitter make money without ruining the startups who are building off of the Twitter platform.

I’m talking about the Tweetdecks and Twhirls of the world. These companies are quite dependant on the Twitter platform, much like many Facebook application vendors were crushed by FB’s capricious ways. A meaningful % of Twitter users use an outside application to do their tweeting (see a report from Hubspot to learn more -Hubspot is the source of the chart below.)

Like it or not, Twitter is not the preferred interface for many Twitter users. I don’t think that I could use Twitter without TweetDeck; it would be information overload. (I wish I had TweetDeck for my email – anyone working on this? Don’t say Xobni – my computer didn’t like it and it was a pain to uninstall.)

How can Twitter create revenue without damaging these users experiences and destroying these application providers? I’d imagine that Twitter revenue efforts would have to use existing “rails,” i.e. can’t rely on side banners on of the Twitter website or special pop ups/interfaces, unless it could also be pushed through the outside vendors’ applications. While I can think of several revenue models that would easily fit into the existing Twitter system (such as forcing everyone to get sponsored tweets from advertisers), what would happen if a outside vendor decided to helpfully block marketing messages for their users? Would Twitter cut off the application? What if Twitter wants to sell some value added service to certain users (marketers) in the form of an application, only to see a freeware version created by a 3rd party. Will they block this?

I don’t have an answer to the question but I find it pretty interesting. I hope Twitter finds a way to place nice with the applications being built off of its platform, because I believe that a lot of the long term value for the customers will come from some of these application providers. So, if you’re listening Twitter – keep up the good work but don’t kill your friends when you start to make money!