Late last week Shel Israel wrote an An Open Letter to the Twitter Guys. He’s right on, and his post stands in stark contrast to the chatter a couple of weeks ago that Twitter proves that the only important thing is to aggregate users – leaving aside a biz plan for later.
No one seems to care about mobile Twitter (which seems insane to me), but my 250/week limit was reached in the early evening today – Tuesday. The limit is simply a cost-cutting measure by a company bleeding money on every tweet. The problem for Twitter is that I can easily defect – everyone I get messages from (more or less) is on Facebook, and I can subscribe to their status updates on my mobile – half the time they come from Twitter anyhow.
Part of the problem may be that US companies are backed by US VC – and so they focus primarily on US adoption and usage. The social networking world in general makes that a very dangerous position to take – social network adoption rates are generally lower in the US than most other “rich” countries. A company that is primarily concerned with US results for a US exit will throw the rest of us under the bus pretty quickly.
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I should say that I realize this whole discussion is pretty quixotic – when I say I realize that no one cares about mobile Twitter, I mean that I understand that although it was originally designed to be primarily a mobile service, they found very quickly (it seems) that most usage was via browsers and third-party apps using the API. And, of course, the thing still works very nicely in my computer.
I just miss my mobile tweets when they shut down each week, and for me the mobile functionality is by far the most compelling part of the Twitter value proposition. And if they had a business plan, there would be a way for me to address this – or not – myself instead of just being disappointed.