> That's right, they all failed because the users don't care about the technologies and the APIs.
I'm so glad we agree on this. Users indeed do not care about technologies or APIs.
They care about great experiences.
Twitter does not excel at great experiences. If they did, third party clients would not have to exist.
Since they do, 23% of Twitter users choose to consume the network via superior-to-them, third-party offerings. Twitter has signed the death warrant of those products. Craigslist would be a valid counter-argument had it been initially built on the strength of third-party clients and then killed them. (PadMapper doesn't count, before you bring it up. It came to craigslist after dominance, not before.)
Twitter, on the other hand, has two native clients that began their very lives as third-party products.
We'll see. Maybe Twitter will be just fine after taking their most engaged users and sending them elsewhere.
Or maybe the users will follow their tech-savvy friends to a better experience, which again, isn't a hard category to trounce Twitter in.
Twitter is like Cosmopolitan or People, not like "technology." Except to the extent that all media relies on technology to enable it.
Twitter is an experience. I actually hardly use it because all I can figure out it is good for is passively receiving spam from people I am following as they try to market their ventures to me.
But I recognize that early adopters mean nothing in this context, technology is irrelevant. You guys need to start trying to create some real tech and stop this fantasy that markup is some kind of high tech stuff in 2012.
I think you just made Twitter's point for them. Yes, their current apps have problems, but I think they are really worried about the varied Twitter experience people are having on all of the various implementation of it. If someone has a bad experience on Echofon, they might blame that on Twitter, so I think you are right, and this is Twitters (possibly flawed) way of holding onto that.
And Facebook wouldn't have given way to G+.... Wait, that didn't happen.
Early adopters influence the populace when it comes to new experiences. Any new twitter clone is not a new experience. If twitter already solves the "celebrity fix" problem, it doesn't matter how new or shiny its technological superior will be. No one will care. This is exactly why CL is still king, why Facebook is still king, and why twitter has nothing to worry about.
(Myspace was different in that facebook had the "cool" factor that myspace never had).
This is why you're missing the point.
Twitter isn't "new technology". It's not even a technology company. It is a way for people to get their celebrity fix.
Sure early adopters would move to whatever Dalton Caldwell is building. That's a non-event to 99.9% of Twitter users.
Followers of Lady Gaga don't care what new service Robert Scoble is jumping to.