A year ago, I cautioned people that if we aren’t careful, Twitter was going to eventually be a bunch of PR people talking to a bunch of PR people. Then, last week, I boldly predicted that I think Twitter is going to die if they don’t quickly figure out how to make money. So I was anxious to hear the big advertising announcement by Twitter earlier this week…hoping they’ve figured out how to monetize, and balance the professions who participate in, my favorite social platform.
Um, not so much.
Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.
Okay. So say I want drop in a few lines of javascript to this blog. I do that and now people can tweet directly from my site? Isn’t that what the TweetMeme button does at the top of each post?
But there’s more.
When we’re ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.
So, initially, this won’t be available to me. That’s fine. But what they’re describing sounds like an RSS feed to me. But instead of the content coming directly to me, I go to the New York Times (for instance) and I read a reporter I really like. From there, I can follow her on Twitter and read her stream, without leaving her article on the newspaper’s Web site.
Perhaps I’m dense. Or maybe it’s because I don’t understand programming and developing. But this makes no sense to me. Maybe it’ll be like Facebook Connect (which I still can’t find value in using) or it’ll create a way for me to stop using TweetDeck (please, no! I love my TweetDeck). There is still more news to come, which will be announced at their developer conference next month.
Until then…where is the advertising in this? How do they balance who participates on the social platform? How are they going to monetize it? What am I missing?