0 Twitter is Missing the Point
Lately Twitter has been having a lot of down time and performance outages. It’s users and API customers are surprisingly sticking with Twitter even in the midst of instability.
However, there is something to be said about the lack of hunger Twitter shows. Twitter in a lot of ways has shown great potential in the open authentication arena. More and more social web applications are using the Twitter API as their primary user infrastructure. Personally this excites me as OpenID just isn’t effective anymore.
The Poorly Tapped Market
Twitter only has one feature which means you aren’t polluted with a million different activities (e.g, Facebook). It bargains the case that one can have an account with very little commitment. This presents a huge opportunity for Twitter.
OpenID has failed in the sense that it has not attempted to penetrate user niches found in large social networks like Facebook and MySpace. People of all age and walks of life are beginning to take up these take networks by the 100s of 1000s. This is where Twitter has the open advantage.
Twitter has grown into a mammoth social network with no help from Facebook or Myspace. And even better? They opened up their API to the masses right from the start. Their API has been used in tools like Cullect and Brightkite in which Twitter acts as a primary or large part of their user infrastructures. So why hasn’t Twitter pursued this small niche of developers? Beats me!
Unless Twitter starts moving around and diversifying their offerings as an API service then I can’t imagine them making a whole lot of money in the long run.