In The Information Age, It's More Important To Expand The Pie Than Eat The Whole Damn Pie

from the open-v.-closed dept

Mathew Ingram recently wrote a fantastic post about Twitter's big mistake a few years back, basically killing off its openness for developers. He builds his argument off of an interesting post from Ben Thompson, arguing that Twitter has lost its strategic focus. Both articles are great, and I recommend them both. In the early days, Twitter was almost completely open. Many of its most useful features and services came from others building on top of it. The very idea of the "@" symbol was the invention of a user. Same with the retweet. Now both are core to Twitter's identity. And, of course, third-party services were what made Twitter usable in the first place. The service didn't really ever take off for me until I used Tweetdeck -- which was a third party service until Twitter bought it. Thankfully, I can still use Tweetdeck (though not on mobile) because Twitter's actions killed off most competitors (and, because of this, Tweetdeck still lags in fixing some basic things -- like an autoscroll problem I've complained about for years). As Ingram notes, Twitter made a big strategic shift, as it started to fear its own openness and worry that it may have resulted in the dreaded "someone else profiting" off of Twitter's foundation:
Namely, a crucial turning point in Twitter’s evolution that arguably helped put it where it is today, both in a positive sense (it is a publicly-traded $25-billion company) and a negative one (its growth potential is in question and its strategy doesn’t seem to be working). And that turning point happened about five years ago, when Twitter decided to turn its back on the third-party ecosystem that helped make it successful in the first place.

This process began gradually, with the acquisition of Tweetie — which became Twitter’s official iOS client — and restrictions on what third parties could do with tweets, including selling advertising related to them. But it escalated quickly, and arguably became an all-out war with Twitter’s moves against Bill Gross, the Idealab founder and inventor of search-related advertising, who was busy acquiring Twitter clients and trying to build an ad model around the public Twitter stream. The idea that someone could monetize Twitter before Twitter itself got around to doing so was what one investor called a “holy shit moment” for the company.
We see this sort of thing in all sorts of areas -- especially around "intellectual property." People have a very emotional "holy shit moment" pretty frequently when they see "someone else" making money by leveraging something that they feel some sort of ownership attachment to, whether or not there's any legitimate basis for that attachment. So many of the intellectual property fights we see stem from that general feeling of "Hey, that's ripping me off!" even if the actions of those third parties may not have any real impact on the originating content, service or idea.

In the internet era, however, this is almost always the wrong decision. The internet thrives based on the flow of information. You want information to flow more broadly, rather than to hoard it. Historical economics is based on worlds of scarcity, and in worlds of scarcity it makes sense to hoard resources, as they are valuable by themselves. Yet, in worlds of abundance you want the opposite. You want abundant or infinite resources to flow freely because they do something special: they increase the value of everything else around them. You want openness, not closed systems. You want sharing, not hoarding. You want copying, not restrictions. Because all of those things increase the overall pie massively, even if some of that pie (or even large portions) are captured by others.

As Ingram notes, at least some at Twitter recognized this at the time. An early influential employee at Twitter, its chief engineer Alex Payne, wrote about how he tried to persuade the company to go in that direction:

Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in a decade, but it was (and, I think, remains) my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized, and that all businesses who build walled gardens will eventually see them torn down. Predating Twitter, there were the wars against the centralized IM providers that ultimately yielded Jabber, the breakup of Ma Bell, etc. etc. This isn’t to say that one can’t make quite a staggeringly lot of money with a walled garden or centralized communications utility, and the investment community’s salivation over the prospect of IPOs from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter itself suggests that those companies will probably do quite well with a closed-but-for-our-API approach.

The call for a decentralized Twitter speaks to deeper motives than profit: good engineering and social justice. Done right, a decentralized one-to-many communications mechanism could boast a resilience and efficiency that the current centralized Twitter does not. Decentralization isn’t just a better architecture, it’s an architecture that resists censorship and the corrupting influences of capital and marketing. At the very least, decentralization would make tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as email. Now that would be a triumph of humanity.

But he lost that argument to those who wanted to keep the pie smaller, but to capture more of it for themselves. That may have helped the company go public, but it has put the company in a serious bind today. One in which Wall Street is profoundly disappointed that what Twitter is capturing for itself "isn't enough" and the innovations that the company needs to keep growing and innovating are much harder to come by. Sure, it does things like Vine and Periscope -- both of which it bought out in infancy -- but to do so it's had to hamstring other third-party developers like Meerkat.

Ingram also highlights another Ben Thompson post on what Twitter might have been had it gone down this more open path (he wrote this after the whole Meerkat thing):
I would argue that what makes Twitter the company valuable is not Twitter the app or 140 characters or @names or anything else having to do with the product: rather, it’s the interest graph that is nearly priceless. More specifically, it is Twitter identities and the understanding that can be gleaned from how those identities are used and how they interact that matters.

If one starts with that sort of understanding — that Twitter the company is about the graph, not the app — one would make very different decisions. For one, the clear priority would not be increasing ad inventory on the Twitter timeline (which in this understanding is but one manifestation of an interest graph) but rather ensuring as many people as possible have and use a Twitter identity. And what would be the best way to do that? Through 3rd-parties, of course! And by no means should those 3rd-parties be limited to recreating the Twitter timeline: they should build all kinds of apps that have a need to connect people with common interests: publishers would be an obvious candidate, and maybe even an app that streams live video. Heck, why not a social network that requires a minimum of 140 characters, or a killer messaging app? Try it all, anything to get more people using the Twitter identity and the interest graph.
There's a more fundamental premise at work here. In the information era, spreading more information increases the pie massively and opens up many more opportunities. The challenge is that many others can also take advantage of many of those opportunities, but as the core player in the space, a company like Twitter has a clear and natural advantage, even if it did what Payne had wanted to do many years ago and give up the underlying control altogether.

This is, unfortunately, a profoundly difficult concept for many to grasp -- especially when they're in the midst of it. Hell, even as someone who regularly talks about this very idea, I still get the initial emotional pang of being upset when I see someone else get success with an idea that I had first (whether or not they got it from me). It's only natural to have that visceral reaction. The real question is what do you do about it. Do you fret? Do you try to control? Or do you realize that in broadening these ideas and sharing them more widely, it creates greater opportunities across the board?

It's impossible to know what would have happened had Twitter taken a different path. But it seems clear that remaining a more open platform (or even moving to a fully distributed one), would have resulted in a tool that was much more useful today, with a much larger audience and much greater innovation. It's too bad we didn't get to live in that world.
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Filed Under: closed, developers, distributed, increasing the pie, infrastructure, non-zero sum game, open, ownership, platform
Companies: twitter


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  1. icon
    Ninja (profile), 5 May 2015 @ 12:17pm

    It's impossible to know what would have happened had Twitter taken a different path.

    Is it really? I like to compare this to a game that allows mods and a game that doesn't. IT's very clear that the ones that allow free modding have much longer shelf lives even becoming classics (see Doom). So I'd say that Twitter would be much more valuable today and there would be things based on it but entirely different. Would it be alive and kicking? I don't know, it would depend on their capacity to absorb and expand what people build upon them.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. icon
    Mason Wheeler (profile), 5 May 2015 @ 1:47pm

    It should be their new slogan:
    Twitter: By twits, for twits.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    John Fenderson (profile), 5 May 2015 @ 2:01pm

    The curse of going public

    That may have helped the company go public, but it has put the company in a serious bind today.


    I've seen this many, many times in my days. More often than not, going public marks the point at which the company stops doing innovative and wonderful things in order to focus on extracting profits. Which is fine for those entrepreneurs who are in it to maximize the cash, but not so fine for those who are in it to do really cool and wonderful things.

    (This is also why I have always avoided venture capital money like the plague.)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 5 May 2015 @ 2:42pm

    Re: The curse of going public

    And what does Twitter manufacture?

    Going public is great for manufacturers, but can be risky for other types of businesses. Stockholders, especially institutional holders, expect dividends. That requires a continuing income stream that at least stays the same each year, if not increasing each year.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. icon
    Roger Strong (profile), 5 May 2015 @ 2:48pm

    History Repeats

    I watched this a couple decades ago with Ashton Tate - one of the "Big Three" software companies along with Microsoft and Lotus - and it's dBASE relational database language.

    A thriving development community had grown around dBase, providing custom programming, add-ins, development tools and consulting. They pushed dBASE into new markets at no cost to Ashton Tate.

    Then the company founder died, and his replacement was hostile to the dBASE community. The company destroyed the market for many of the add-ons by announcing that the same features would be in the next version of dBase - features that often turned out to be vaporware. For others they used vague legal threats.

    This led the community to gather instead around other "xBase" language products like FoxBASE/FoxPro and Clipper.

    Ashton Tate tried to stop them by filing court papers to declare the dBase language the property of the company. The case against Fox Software was tossed out after the court ruled that because dBase was based on JPL/DIS - a fact that Ashton Tate failed to disclose - the company didn't "own" it.

    Between that and other bad decisions, Ashton Tate quickly disappeared.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    avideogameplayer, 5 May 2015 @ 7:37pm

    Money tweets, bullshit Facebooks...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. icon
    lfroen (profile), 6 May 2015 @ 12:46am

    Re:

    Let's not rewrite history, mmm-ok? Doom did not became classic because of "mods" (fan-made maps). It became classic because it was 1st of the kind, simply as that.

    And Twitter? What is this anyway? IRC-with-ads-on-the-web? I'm still waiting to meet anyone who uses it.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 6 May 2015 @ 3:32am

    Re: Re:

    AS much snark as this post contains let's compare and contrast The PC versions of Skyrim and Dark Souls: both games that came out around the same time, both of which have radically different playstyles, and yet both are still soehwat regularly played on all versions.

    But the PC versions are where the similarities end: Skyrim has a massive fan-mod community, and it still a thriving game; yet Dark Souls is nigh-on impossible to play without an additional peripheral on the PC.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. icon
    Mason Wheeler (profile), 6 May 2015 @ 6:53am

    Re: The curse of going public

    Yeah, it seems to be the shark-jumpage point for software companies, every freaking time.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  10. icon
    nasch (profile), 6 May 2015 @ 11:41am

    Re: Re:

    It became classic because it was 1st of the kind, simply as that.

    Not if by "the kind" you mean first person shooter. It wasn't even Id's first.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-person_shooter#Origins:_1970s_to_late_1980s

    link to this | view in thread ]

  11. icon
    Oshoma (profile), 6 May 2015 @ 1:15pm

    only if they were a little like facebook

    It's true about what this at articles write twitter not really getting right in some area. For instance, twitter's method of advertising is way too much for an average advertiser who is just coming up. Their minimum advert fee is $5000 which is way too much.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  12. icon
    Ninja (profile), 7 May 2015 @ 8:39am

    Re: Re:

    Was it? Wasn't it Wolfenstein or something? If so pardon my lack of knowledge.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  13. icon
    nasch (profile), 7 May 2015 @ 8:50am

    Re: Re: Re:

    Wasn't it Wolfenstein or something?

    Wolfenstein 3D was the first big successful FPS and kind of considered the granddaddy of the genre but wasn't actually the earliest one.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  14. identicon
    Pragmatic, 8 May 2015 @ 6:10am

    People have a very emotional "holy shit moment" pretty frequently when they see "someone else" making money by leveraging something that they feel some sort of ownership attachment to... even if the actions of those third parties may not have any real impact on the originating content, service or idea.

    THAT's the problem. We need to gently nudge people away from the idea that they can own ideas. As a wise person recently pointed out, the way YOU use the idea you had is going to vary from the way another person uses it so don't get upset if someone else does better with it or makes money from it; you just need another idea.

    And for the love of God, let's get away from calling it "property," even if we're the only ones who don't. The rest of the world has a lot to learn. Are we willing to put the time in to teach them?

    link to this | view in thread ]


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