My instant review of Twitter's new business plan | Hacker News Reader

My instant review of Twitter's new business plan

scripting.com

17 pointsidiginous10 comments

Twitter is clearly not going to ask for a cut of ads not displayed on Twitter proper. To claim otherwise is a disingenuous scare tactic.

Fred Wilson's responds to the same effect in the comment thread as well:

the whole "we reserve the right to request a share of ad revenue" is designed to prevent people from going around the new rules. the rules themselves are pretty clear "only twitter can put promoted tweets in search results and timelines"

Seriously, I can't remember the last time I read a scripting.com post on HN that wasn't useless. I especially like the part in this post where Dave Winer plugs his invention of RSS for the millionth time, and states that Feedburner should have given him some money for monetizing RSS.

And exactly what would they have done with a percentage of Feedburner's revenue anyways? Endowed the RSS Foundation? It's a spec, not a business.

> Twitter is clearly not going to ask for a cut of ads not displayed on Twitter proper. To claim otherwise is a disingenuous scare tactic.

It's not at all disingenuous. See http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms Section IV.2(a)

... In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us (recoupable against any fees payable to Twitter for data licensing). For example, you may sell sponsorships or branding around gadgets or iframes that include Tweets and other customized visualizations of Twitter.

The question is, where to move next? Google Buzz?

There is identi.ca/status.net, but I think there were some issues. It should have synced with Twitter more (let me read my Twitter followers).

Personally I am still hoping for a world where everybody can host and own their own stuff, even if it seems unlikely at the moment.

Have been wondering the same thing myself, and opened up an identi.ca account to see what it's like. Nobody I know uses it yet but there are a good number of Free Software and Android oriented users.

If your product changes from a tool to an avenue for consumption, the users who gave it life will leave for another. This has happened so many times, you would think it would be written down in a playbook or engraved on plaques at businesses.

It seems Dave wants Twitter to go out of business, sure it's not the perfect open platform but with 200 employees and costly infrastructure to run they can't really afford to give others the opportunity to one up their revenue model with very little outlay themselves.

Ooh - notice that Dave has switched from a fluid width layout to a fixed width one in the last couple of days? That's an interesting move. My instant review is that the fluid width layout was better ;-)

For the iPad:

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/05/23/makingStoriesBea...

That's interesting, but I use the iPad a lot too and the fluid layout worked fine on it too, since it just spans to the max width.

Maybe he was trying to focus on portrait and fit into 768 pixels without the iPad kicking in its portrait scaling, but there are other ways of doing that that don't mean you have to squash your site into 768 pixels width and annoy desktop users.

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