Ryan Sarver wrote:
> [...] However when we dug
> in a little bit we realized that it was causing massive confusion among
user's who
> had an iPhone and were looking to use Twitter for the first time. They
would
> head to the App Store, search for Twitter and would see results that
included a
> lot of apps that had nothing to do with Twitter and a few that did, but a
new
> user wouldn't find what they were looking for and give up. That is a lost
user for
> all of us.
>
> [...] We will also admit
> our mistakes when they are made and the Blackberry client should never
have
> been labeled "official". It has since been changed and you won't see that
> language used with Twitter clients in the future.
The "officialness" of the Blackberry app wasn't much of a problem. The
problem was/is the name and the logo. It is confusing to users to have the
app named "Twitter" and it is confusing to see the app branded solely with
the "t" logo. The "t" mark is something that should definitely be protected,
but I think it has a lot of *functional* uses for it as an indicator or
badge that make it inappropriate as the logo for a single application on any
platform. IMO, it would be much better for Twitter in the long run to have
the "t" logo used as a badge to indicate that an app has met some
quality/security criteria--like the "Compatible with Windows 7" logo
program, the "Made for iPod," the Visa logo, etc. That would be something
that would allow you to start a process of ensuring a wide variety of
high-quality applications that are closely aligned with your business goals,
without setting the bar too high or the terms too strict for simpler
applications with a more casual connection to Twitter.
Many mobile operators and phone manufacturers have very bad policies about
supporting their products once they've been replaced with newer models. It
is very likely that, if you let mobile operators and mobile manufacturers
have exclusive uses of the trademarks on their platforms, that those
trademarks will be attached to software that becomes stale, obsolete, or
even totally non-functional on otherwise serviceable devices that aren't
even that old. It would be a big mistake to reserve Twitter's branding for
applications which don't even end up staying in the top tier of Twitter apps
on their platform in terms of quality.
Anyway, I think that everybody will soon see that "officialness" of
competing applications is a very small problem compared to issues like
degradation of UI w/ advertising or strict restrictions on how spam-ish
Twitter-provided content is filtered. I really hope that you guys have
something extremely clever planned for monetization. I have been unable to
think of many ways to make money with Twitter that didn't involve annoying
end-users with ads or encouraging end-users to annoy each other ("RT to
win..."), and AFAICT nothing is going to work unless it keeps users' home
and @mentions timelines clean with less advertising/spam than there already
is now, instead of more. I am genuinely curious to see what you guys have
come up with.
Regards,
Brian
@BRIAN_____
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