Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated!
Today Twitter announced more integration of services into the core functionality of the microblogging platform. Twitter has added rich media to web interface, added related content, added mini profiles that will pop-up on the mouse click and introduced a cleaner design to enhance the timeline. All these things have possible through third party apps and browser helper objects, Twitter just brought them into the standard feature set of the service.
Lately it seems that any service that becomes a success as an add-on to Twitter has been assimilated by Twitter. Link shorteners, Retweet buttons, mobile apps and advertising have all been assimilated by Twitter.
If you take a step back and gaze at the bigger picture you can see that Twitter is taking every step to add as much value to the Twitter experience as possible. This might be an indication that Twitter is moving into a Freemium business model to start making money from the millions of users who flock to thee service and are willing to pay for the latest features.
Normally a company would have pumped tons of cash into research and development. Twitter has found a better way to research and develop extensions to service – open the API, then when they discover a service that enhances it’s service it will replicate it in-house. You have got to admit that letting others do all the R&D is a faster way to become profitable.
