The risks of parasitic apps
Twitter’s new and native URL shortening functionality (t.co) is going to make other URL shorteners such as ow.ly, is.gd and bit.ly totally obsolete.
I guess those businesses could see it coming. URL shortening is fairly basic functionality. It would take a decent developer a couple of days (if that) to comp something together that works well enough. It seems morally bankrupt of large social networks to toss aside small apps that add value to their platform by blatantly copying functionality.
However, with URL shorteners it seems like it was simply an oversight not to add them from the off and that their replacement was inevitable. Incidentally, it seems like URL shortening is going to be a key factor in their Promoted Tweets revenue plan. Whereas some applications like Farmville on Facebook seem very difficult to duplicate because of their originality and quirky appeal. It would seem a bit rubbish for Facebook to simply come out with Farmbook as a direct competitor to Farmville once they saw the success of the latter. However, it doesn’t stop them copying the likes of iLike or RockYou. It will be interesting to see how Twitter ‘deals’ with the URL shortening apps. When they omitted search functionality in the early days, they simply bought up Summize and added it to the search subdomain. The sum that Twitter paid for Summize hasn’t been disclosed, however, Summize itself was funded to the tune of $750k so it certainly wasn’t worthless. Suffice to say some developers got jobs out of it.
It’s sad that, as a parasitic app, your success can be your undoing. And developers are going to start trusting large networks less and less. The strategy for many, such as Tweetdeck and Farmville is to use the network as an incubator and then detach themselves from the host like the chestburster scene in Alien, albeit with slightly less blood.
The kind of risk involved in developing a wholly parasitic app is one of the dangers of Technology Remixing – you’re always dependent on the whims of the host.
6 comments
Ripley: When we throw the switches, how long before the ship blows?
“Nuke the entire site from orbit—it’s the only way to be sure”
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nuke-it-from-orbit
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nuke-it-from-orbit
HAHA
Nice post and well articulated conclusion.
I suspect the biggest player, bit.ly, will be OK. Theirs is not a completely parasitic app. They’ve created a new type of value – namely analytics – which isn’t solely dependent or tied to Twitter.
Unfortunately for them, Twitter has realised that this value can be deployed in another direction – which is NOT really about preventing SPAM/phishing – it’s about building intelligence about people’s click preferences, and then targeting Promoted Tweets based on that intel. Which is genius.
Google talk a lot about their contextual targeting, but it’s actually pretty limited because it’s primarily intention-based search ads. With this, Twitter will build a psychographic targeting engine which I think will make click-throughs sky-rocket from their currently abysmal rates.
Interesting point @Justin. I also think that Bit.ly is far from parasitic, on the contrary, by providing me with free analytics about popularity of links i publish, it fills the gap that Twitter left unattended so far.
The added benefit of Bit.ly also lies in the fact that it is a) independent of Twitter with its technical limitations (outages, limited API calls, extremely limited search history), b) it provides publishers with a way to rise above the crowd & users with an easy filter by branding shortened URLs (think http://wpo.st, politi.co, flic.kr, nyti.ms) and finally b) regular publishers’ can enjoy free (as opposed to paid analytics Twitter plans to provide).
http://wpo.st
The problem, however, is that if everybody jumps on “http://t.co” bandwagon, services like Bit.ly, despite all the awesome benefits they provide, will become sidelined. Its people’s clicks that publishers are after and if those clicks will happen through Twitter URL shortener, then publishers will have to adopt Twitter’s platform.
So, in this respect, the dismissal of “parasitic” applications will leave all of us worst off.
Thanks Artas & Justin.
I think you’re both right about bit.ly, it’s an excellent little service but they’re going to struggle to compete with Twitter’s service for sure.