On 27/1/09 19:07, Chad Etzel wrote:
Hi all,
I have been contemplating sending this email for a long time, and
finally have decided to just do it, so here goes:
I understand that we are all trying to gain large user-bases for our
twitter apps, and I know there are several tactics to go about doing
it; but I am wondering what is everbody's opinion on the tactic I
refer to as twitter app user poaching in which app devs tweet out to
people right after a user mentions some other app in their tweets:
@somebody hey, if you likeinsert competitor app here you should
trymy app! http://link.to.my.app.com/
Obviously people are monitoring their app's brand and their
competitors' brand, which is obviously a savvy business strategy in
general... but somehow to me, in the twitter ecosystem, this feels
kinda sleazy. I have consciously tried to avoid doing this because a)
the aforementioned sleaziness, and b) i don't think my followers would
appreciate a stream of constant hey check out my app tweets. Maybe
I am alone here, what does everyone else think?
This would not be so bad if some of the apps that have started
poaching mine were brand new and not very well known yet. But at
least a couple have received a lot of coverage on the big social media
blogs (mashable, techcrunch, etc...). None of my apps have had such
coverage (and yes, I am willing to admit I am jealous of that fact,
but it is what it is), and despite that, I have had a lot of fun
growing my user-base organically through twitter itself and my users'
word-of-mouth recommendations. I don't really appreciate others
coming in and sniping my users away.
So, maybe I'm just being weak and need to grow a pair and deal with it
(by either a) sucking it up, or b) engaging in poaching myself, or c)
both). Maybe all is fair in love and tweets...
Would love to hear about others' experiences in this area.
They probably *should* try other apps, so they find one that suits them
best. Hopefully yours! You can't please all the users, all of the time.
Worry less about people comparing, and more about building an app that
will compare well. Maybe they'll try the others, go back to yours, and
then write about why they preferred it.
BTW I've been having trouble with Twhirl today, and posted about it, got
useful feedback from twhirl users and developers, as well as people
using other apps. We all have different constraints and preferences, and
exploring the different design possibilities is a healthy and natural
thing...
cheers,
Dan
--
http://danbri.org/
