{"id":3088,"date":"2015-08-10T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-09T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/?p=3088"},"modified":"2021-07-13T20:54:42","modified_gmt":"2021-07-13T10:54:42","slug":"what-if-google-bought-twitter-a-conversation-and-some-further-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/2015\/08\/10\/what-if-google-bought-twitter-a-conversation-and-some-further-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"What If Google Bought Twitter? A Conversation and Some Further Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Twitter has been in the news recently, for all the wrong reasons. Business media report that Twitter shareholders are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com.au\/twitter-morale-problem-2015-8\">disappointed with the company\u2019s latest results<\/a>; and this follows recent turmoil in the company\u2019s leadership which saw the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com.au\/interview-with-twitter-ceos-dick-costolo-and-jack-dorsey-2015-6\">departure of controversial CEO Dick Costolo<\/a> and the (temporary) return of co-founder Jack Dorsey until a permanent replacement is found.<\/p>\n<p>All this has served to feed rumours that Google, having recently called time on its own underperforming social network <em>Google+<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/fortune.com\/2015\/08\/04\/google-buy-twitter\/\">might be interested in acquiring Twitter<\/a>. From one perspective, this would clearly make sense \u2013 you can <strong>check here<\/strong> that social media are now a key driver of Web traffic and a potentially important advertising market, and Google will not want to remain disconnected from this space for long. On the other hand, though, given its chequered history with the now barely remembered <em>Google Buzz<\/em> as well as major effort <em>Google+<\/em>, <em>Twitter<\/em> users (and the third-party companies that serve this userbase) may well be concerned about what a Google acquisition of the platform may mean for them.<\/p>\n<p>I had the opportunity to explore these questions in some detail in an extended interview with ABC Radio\u2019s Tim Cox last week. In a wide-ranging discussion, we reviewed the issues troubling <em>Google+<\/em> and <em>Twitter<\/em>, and the difficulties facing any player seeking to establish a new social media platform alongside global market leader <em>Facebook<\/em>. Here\u2019s the audio:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/218034249&amp;color=ff5500&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Let us take this conversation further: what if Google did buy Twitter? From my point of view, this could turn out a positive move, <em>if<\/em> Google treats the platform appropriately (as it did, arguably, with past acquisitions such as Blogger, YouTube, and Google Maps). It\u2019s become very obvious over the past months that Twitter\u2019s stock market listing has been a curse at least as much as a blessing: while it\u2019s raised substantial new capital, of course, it\u2019s also exposed the company to the expectations of shareholders who seem to fundamentally misunderstand what Twitter is or can be.<\/p>\n<p>As a platform, <em>Twitter<\/em> is not and will never be a competitor to <em>Facebook<\/em>, whatever its shareholders seem to think. Both might be classed under the overall rubric of \u201csocial media\u201d, but any direct comparisons constitute a category error: the appeal of a strong-ties, small-world networks platform like <em>Facebook<\/em>, where we tend to network predominantly with family and friends, is necessarily fundamentally different from that of a weak-ties, large-world space like <em>Twitter<\/em>, where we can follow \u2013 and attempt to strike up conversations with \u2013 celebrities, politicians, and other users outside of our immediate networks.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s a very different kind of social network, with its own unique uses, and it is futile to hope that <em>Twitter<\/em> will eventually attract the same number of users, or the same user activity patterns, as <em>Facebook<\/em>. Worse still, to try to reshape <em>Twitter<\/em> in <em>Facebook<\/em>\u2019s image by force will almost inevitably kill off the platform.<\/p>\n<p>If Google understands this, and treats <em>Twitter<\/em> appropriately (which probably includes accepting it as a loss leader for the time being), this could well turn the platform\u2019s fortunes around. <em>Twitter<\/em>\u2019s recognised strengths are as a flat, public, and open network that excels especially in live contexts; <em>Twitter<\/em> is the place where most recent breaking news stories first broke, and a space where users gather as a temporary public and community to collectively participate in shared experiences from the World Cup to Eurovision. Beyond any marketing hype, it genuinely serves as the pulse of the planet in a great many contexts.<\/p>\n<p>This live insight into what news stories and other information are currently hot (and thus should be served as search results, too) may well be valuable enough for Google to fork out a few billion, even if there still doesn\u2019t seem to be a workable model for generating significant direct advertising revenue from the platform.<\/p>\n<p>But whoever takes on Twitter, one of the first things the new CEO will need to do is to fundamentally rebuild Twitter\u2019s relationship with those on whom, historically, its successes have most depended: the flotilla of third-party developers and researchers that surrounds the <em>Twitter<\/em> mothership. As Jean Burgess and I have documented in our contribution to the forthcoming collection <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.palgrave.com\/page\/detail\/digital-methods-for-social-science-helene-snee\/?isb=9781137453655\">Digital Methods for Social Science<\/a><\/em>, those developers \u2013 and the early adopters and lead users whom they have served \u2013 have made the platform what it is: they developed powerful <em>Twitter<\/em> clients and tools, and laid the groundwork for the social media analytics approaches that have become crucial for making sense of trends on <em>Twitter<\/em> and elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p>Sadly, though, especially under Dick Costolo Twitter\u2019s relationship with these crucial allies in the promotion of <em>Twitter<\/em> as a platform and a community soured significantly: abrupt and radical changes to the terms of service of the Twitter API (which govern what data companies and their tools could gain access to) in pursuit of more revenue undermined this crucial third-party ecosystem and stymied further innovation. And if anything, the handful of exceptions from this new, more restrictive r\u00e9gime \u2013 such as the Twitter Data Grants for researchers, which supported <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.twitter.com\/2014\/twitter-datagrants-selections\">a total of only six out of 1,300 proposed projects<\/a> \u2013 caused further offence rather than restoring goodwill.<\/p>\n<p>Absent any major new investments, a Twitter relying mainly on the support of its shareholders seems unlikely to change tack in this way \u2013 it will continue to chase revenue by attempting to commercialise its data, and in the process also continue to alienate the crucial third-party developer community. This is a path of diminishing returns: the data are valuable only as long as there are popular and meaningful applications for <em>Twitter<\/em> as a platform, but those applications have historically been created by the third-party developers and the power users they support.<\/p>\n<p>Freed from the short-term, unrealistic demands of the stock market through an acquisition by Google (or another cashed-up investor), on the other hand, Twitter could dial back its desperate efforts to commercialise its APIs and the data they provide, and return to its original, more permissive data access r\u00e9gime in order to nurture and support new efforts at research and development. Such a shift in policy could well be the shot in the arm Twitter needs to ensure its longer-term survival \u2013 but it depends on the intervention of a new benefactor. Is Google ready to play \u2013 or is it still too disheartened from its past attempts to enter the social media market?<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twitter has been in the news recently, for all the wrong reasons. Business media report that Twitter shareholders are disappointed with the company\u2019s latest results; and this follows recent turmoil in the company\u2019s leadership which saw the departure of controversial CEO Dick Costolo and the (temporary) return of co-founder Jack Dorsey until a permanent replacement &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/2015\/08\/10\/what-if-google-bought-twitter-a-conversation-and-some-further-thoughts\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;What If Google Bought Twitter? A Conversation and Some Further Thoughts&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3091,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[293,294,214,298],"class_list":["post-3088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-twitter","tag-data-access","tag-google","tag-platform-politics","tag-twitter","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3088"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3487,"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3088\/revisions\/3487"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}