TL;DR; Solve advertiser's problem. Mass spam users to earn money. Block applications. Cut API access. We deserve better...
Started with Facebook in 2004, Twitter joined the gang two years later. We heard their stories, even watched a movie about Facebook. Even though there was some fiction part in the story, made a good movie. Hey that's how Hollywood works.
Social platforms gained huge popularity, raised lots of VC money. Now it's time to pay back, the money that helped them to build these massive networks, going years without any cash flow. Hired more and more people every day.
Social Mafia in Action
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. -Albert Einstein
Twitter have closed a number of application's API Access without any warning or explanation. Our data, that we have created together. We cannot retrieve all of our data. Twitter decides not to show it because of some silly reasons. Here is an example
LinkedIn also did this.
Advertisement Driven Culture - Advertisement Driven Development
Now, especially Twitter is going on the advertisement route; in a very wrong way.
Dalton Caldwell described this very well in his article, the choice Twitter has made at the time;
One camp wanted to build the entire business around their realtime API. In this scenario, Twitter would have turned into something like a realtime cloud API company. The other camp looked at Google’s advertising model for inspiration, and decided that building their own version of AdWords would be the right way to go. As you likely already know, the advertising group won that battle, and many of the open API people left the company.
They focus on the growth of the network - Need more Lady Gaga - Justin Bieber Fans
Facebook also display ads on full scale, but not within the stream, near the stream. And one thing that Facebook does is to engage users more and has a huge integration points and Open Graph.
I believe Twitter spends all of their time and focus to monetize. Satisfy advertisers. Buy out all the possible valuable companies/products and block all the applications that they don't like. Shred all the API access to a lower level. to use Partners to monetize API access. They also show the ads within the stream. Search for something, you will see a ad and it's totally unrelated as well.
They are missing a great point. If you start to irrate me with your ads, I won't be happy and I'm not happy. I will start to engage less.
There are so many trash accounts in Twitter, that keeps on spamming people with pictures that they are not. They follow people to get more followers. You receive an email, which is definitely a spam account, programmed to Tweet great quotes and then promote something their own.
I don't see any features that users want is implemented anymore. ( Somebody needs to remember who invented (@)mentions and #(HashTags).
Only features that advertisers want or the features that will help Twitter to gain more advertiser’s bucks in exchange display their messages to a large audience.
I believe this is what is called Social Media Mass Spamming. They have recently block an app which was spamming. Well, isn't Twitter itsself spam their users then?
I don't even need to mention privacy issues and performance problems.
The Solution
Google's Search & Ads business makes so much money because users are looking for something. They are much more ready to buy.
When I use Twitter or Facebook, I don't search for a product. Not directly. I don't mean that Twitter or Facebook will fail on their model. I believe Facebook has a bigger chance on monetizing.
Please remove those ads from Twitter. At least the way you're presenting it right now. Please. But I don't think Twitter's general attitude will change. They've already made their choice.
As we experience more and more"interruption marketing", we are kind of programmed ourselves to stay away from it. That's what happened to T.Vs. I don't have a cable anymore. I don't want to be interrupted. I don't like the popup appears on the screen right away. You're interrupting me to sell something. That's what permission marketing is there for.
That's why Seth Godin wrote this book in 1999; 13 years ago.
It is up to us to take action. See my dream
