Now that Twitter has decided to go to war against its developers, an interesting question is whether this could open the door for a competitor to establish a foothold? At the moment, there is no competition. Twitter rules the roost with 200 million users and enough venture capital to sink a ship.
But as Twitter looks to put the hammer down on its ecosystem, it does make you wonder if it will provide a window someone to wedge itself into the micro-blogging landscape? It hasn’t been for a lack of trying with startups such as Plurk, Pownce, Identi.ca and Jaiku taking a shot at becoming a viable alternative. So far, nothing’s stuck.
Meanwhile, the most interesting micro-blogging startups have shied away from going to head-to-head with Twitter by focusing on the enterprise market, led by Yammer, which is used by more than 100,000 companies worldwide.
So what would it take to knock off Twitter?
What would a new service need to have to convince enough people to jump ship? Would it be new, more or well-integrated features? Pownce, for example, was arguably a more feature-rich service than Twitter but that wasn’t nearly enough to make it a viable competitor or threat to Twitter.
Given how Twitter remains a no-frills service, there may be an opportunity for someone to capitalize by creating a service that includes a multi-column client, a built-in way to share documents and photos, an effective way to build a network, security and a mobile application.
Maybe the new player need to play nice with developers and have a viable business model that helps it become a business while providing value to consumers.
Of course, Twitter is a huge entity to knock off – a Goliath that has yet to run into a David. But this doesn’t mean it’s not vulnerable to a better mousetrap. Friendster once dominated the social networking marketplace, and MySpace was much bigger than Facebook.
Granted, knocking off or just taking on Twitter would be a mammoth undertaking but no one is impenetrable. And if you are a glass half full kind of person, Twitter’s battle with its developers and struggles to come up with a viable business model could be weaknesses that could be exploited.
