Is Twitter taking back the client market?
In another interesting move post their Chirp developer conference where they assured the development community that Twitter would always be there for them Twitter has launched a new Android client.
So I suppose the first question is, whats it like?
Its really excellent, the landing page is superb and with a bunch of really cool features below but it only works with Android 2.1 which we are told is only 27% of the market.
Turn off the animated background
Filter Notifications
Turn On/Off Vibrate
Sync with your Contacts
Sync with Twitter
Set your Sync intervals
Set Notification ringtones and Trackball light
Set your picture upload service (TwitPic or yfrog)
Set your URL shortening service (Bit.ly ot TinyURL)
The real cool one for me is the sync feature, I now have my contacts synced with my twitter contacts on The Nexus.
There is a huge issue coming for the developer community though in my opinion, tweetie2 (whats with that new slot machine style handle?) is now owned by twitter so we now have Apple and Android closed off, I think a super smart next move would be to acquire one man band Gravity to cover off the Nokia/Symbian market and close out the complete mobile space.
Next in Twitters sights must be Apple and Windows dedicated versions, then its game over
I have friends in both these markets and I think they may hang onto some users but in the longterm users will switch to the official client in my opinion. Is twitter going to give these clients the same access as their own client to the “firehouse” ?
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you skipped twitter native blackberry version where it all started.
Interesting point about Gravity and one that not many have picked up on. Would be interesting to see if @Janole sells.. They may be better off hiring him as part of the deal.
Of course, if they need to find a decent mobile web developer to work on m.twitter, I know a guy who might be of use
http://dabr.co.uk
It is bad for Echofon, Twittelator, Seesmic, TweetDeck etc. but on the positive side these guys are now forced to innovate and move away from simply providing a mobile or desktop view of the tweetstream. Up till now the really interesting 3rd party uses of Twitter have been overshadowed by these clients which simply copy what Twitter does in a browser.
The obvious first move is to push multi-site support. TweetDeck already does Facebook but that can be lost in the Twitter hype. Twitter is unlikely to build Facebook or WordPress or Tumblr etc. support into their official clients.
The next move is to provide proper trends and data analysis tools on-top of the firehose. Mine that data and give your users a high-level view of the real-time web. Twitter is likely to continue focusing on being the infrastructure for “the pulse of the planet” and not focus on providing high-level views of it.
Look at all the interesting uses of Google Maps. Google provides clients for mobile and desktop but there are still many innovators building verticals on top of that. Nobody made a company that simply showed you Google Maps on your phone. Everyone realised that was indefensible. So they said “it’s real estate on your mobile, using Google Maps” or “it’s crime on your desktop, using Google Maps.”
So get away from “Twitter, but on your phone” and innovate.