Jack Dorsey. Image via CrunchBase
I've criticized Twitter in the past couple of years for (a) failing to generate more revenue to date and (b) Jack Dorsey's division of time between being CEO of Square and Executive Chairman.
Yet, Twitter is doing some amazing stuff from a revenue perspective recently - especially in mobile. As I've said before, Twitter has mobile in its DNA, as it was started in 2006 as an SMS service. That's a huge advantage in winning in the mobile world we now live in compared to a company like Facebook (FB) which was born and grew into its teenage years as a website and is now trying to understand what to do with this new-fangled mobile stuff.
The Jack Dorsey governance stuff: it is what it is.
But I want to commend Twitter for announcing last week that it was no longer allowing LinkedIn (LNKD) for showing users' tweets on its homepage, as if they were coming directly as LinkedIn status updates.
Some folks - like Mathew Ingram at Gigaom - have wrung their hands that Twitters' actions are going to outrage Twitter's third-party developer ecosystem. My response is: what's a third-party Twitter developer ecosystem?
Twitter has a bad habit in its history of not doing enough things themselves in their own product. Frankly, I think it was because they were lazy and disorganized in their early days.
They didn't make a good web client. They didn't make a good mobile client. They didn't make a photo product.
All they did was give out an API and a bunch of developers took to it as an opportunity.
The company Twitter should model itself after is Sina's (SINA) Weibo -- supposedly a Twitter clone. Yet, it's anything but. Sina Weibo has always owned its experience. iPhone app. iPad app. Inline comments linking to a history. Good photo uploader app.
Look, it's not that hard. Build your own product yourself.
Now, Twitter's doing that. It's smart. If I was an investor, I'd say: about time.
So, to those who worry that this will hurt Twitter with developers in the Twitter ecosystem, I'd say "who cares?" Twitter doesn't need them if they do a good enough job themselves.
LinkedIn shouldn't be able to piggyback off of Twitter's success. Neither should Facebook (FB). I suppose that I'm one of Facebook's 900 million monthly active users -- solely because my tweets get updated directly to Facebook. Now, we're going to see how LinkedIn and Facebook do without Twitter's support.
One last point, why can't Twitter have a decent photo app that lets you upload photos with filters and share them with friends. Is it really that hard? I don't want to demean Instagram, but they had 13 people working there. Can't Jack Dorsey create an internal product team to whip up something half-way decent in about a month? Is it really that hard to copycat something usable?
This past weekend, Instagram went dark because Amazon (AMZN) Web services died due to a rain storm in Virginia and no geographic redundancy apparently. Instagram was down for about a day. During that time, a lot more people in my Twitter stream started using Pic.Twitter.com to upload photos. It seemed like many continued to use the Twitter photo service after Instagram came back on.
Yet, it's a shame Twitter didn't have a better photo product to keep most of those users. Instagram may be worth a billion dollars according to Facebook, but it's really not that hard to copy and reverse engineer. There are no magic beans there.
Twitter needs to continue to mature, put out features that they should own, and continue down this path of ensuring all their users are getting the optimal Twitter experience on the Twitter platform - not some competitor knock-off.
Screw the so-called ecosystem. This ain't show friends, it's show business.
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