Twitter Wants Your Photos
I haven’t written a blog post in a long time so why not start writing again with a topic close to my heart….sharing photos on Twitter. There is by far no shortage of third party sites that are willing to host your precious Twitter photos. Twitpic was one of the first to land on the scene and many have followed since. These sites have users in the 10′s if not 100′s of thousands of users that post millions of photos every day. Twitter photo sharing sites have not only fueled the ever growing photo sharing market, but also Twitter’s growth. So it took me by surprise, well not really, that Twitter is going to announce that they will have their own pic sharing service soon.
This won’t be the first time that Twitter has attempted to cut off the very hand(s) that fuel their growth. Earlier this year Twitter went after 3rd party sites such as TweetDeck and other Twitter based mobile application. Twitter’s reason for creating their own app was that they wanted to control their product. The verdict is not in yet, but there is yet to be a mass exodus from 3rd party apps to Twitter’s own branded app. This brings me to the “real” reason why Twitter is targeting 3rd party applications…..money.
While 3rd party apps have made tons of money from Twitter, Twitter is yet to make any significant revenue. As I said earlier Twitter will claim that they simply want to control their product, but the real reason is money. It amazes me that Twitter’s only visible revenue source is the sponsored tweet section of the site. You would think by now they would have thrown up a banner ad or two. Maybe Twitter is worried that putting up banner ads would scare away their early adopters. The reality is Twitter’s user base is large enough that they can lose a few of their early adopters and still be popular. Do you think celebrities and athletes (users who have the highest follower counts) care if a banner ad appears next to their tweets? I don’t think so!
So this brings me back to the original topic of the email, Twitter’s own pic sharing service. Just as Twitter targeted 3rd party apps the question will arise, “will users of 3rd party pic sharing sites ditch these sites in favor of Twitter’s pic sharing service?”. In the short-term I would say no. In the long term, possibly. It all depends on how tightly Twitter integrates their pic sharing service and if they let 3rd party sties integrate the same with no barriers. Adult pic sharing sites like ourselves will still be in a unique position to weather any sort of fall out. I seriously doubt that Twitter will open their arms and welcome adult photos to be stored on their servers. Only time will tell.
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