Twitter recently made the announcement that they’ll be launching an analytics dashboard sometime in the future. At first glance, one might think “hurray! My favorite open microblogging service is finally building its own, in-house analytics system so I can see exactly how to better utilize my tweets to more comprehensively connect with customers, publicize better, etcetera!” But that person’s kooky, rambling inner monologue is only seeing half the picture.
The other side to the coin is how their loyal developers may find it tricky keeping up with the various directional shifts Twitter has been phasing through. Up until their recent retooling of the site, twitter.com has been a bare bones site designed to be as broad-based a platform as possible. This opened the door for other companies to build more encompassing third party apps, which became such an integral part of using twitter that the twitter blog even pays homage to these apps in a recent post.
Granted, Twitter obviously reserves every right to do to the site what it will, which is why they can pick and choose the best features from their apps and incorporate them into their new design, and it’s totally cool. And the fact that they’re building this analytics dashboard is by no means an act of evil. It’s a shame that it will most likely torpedo all of the other third party apps that have worked with the twitter platform in order to build their analytics tools, but that’s an unfortunate part of how these things go.
So, what’s the big deal? Twitter isn’t giving a clear direction for the big picture course it’s applications will be taking. Should developers build apps to look at pictures and watch videos on? No. Twitter just redesigned the site to cover all that, making it essentially an app itself. Ok then, what about analytics? Nope again, they’re doing that themselves too. Will this discourage developers from building applications that’ll push the platform forward in the future? Possibly. Take Facebook for example, there is a very clear distinction between what Facebook builds in house, and what the companies building Facebook’s apps produce. If Facebook suddenly built its own in-house FarmVille, it’d be bad for business. So does Twitter need to make abundantly clear the role that developers currently play and will continue to play when it comes to building and expanding on their platform? Absolutely. Otherwise, they’ll end up hindering all of this outside innovation that has been propelling them forward up to this point.
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