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So here's what Twitter should do:

1. Allow devs to create third party twitter clients. No limits, no restrictions. The loss of dev trust is so big that they need to do something this huge. If they don't do this, I think Twitter will be forced to sell to a bigger company within 18 months.

Allowing third party twitter clients will quickly kill the official clients, as they're a heap of junk from a UX POV. It doesn't matter that Twitter won't control that. People who think this matters seem to think that Twitter is another Facebook. I can't emphasise strongly enough that Twitter is not a Facebook.

2. Make money selling licenses to third parties for data analysis. Change the licensing and make it cheaper. Make it affordable for small developers. Encourage an explosion of innovation in the way tweets are used. Work with these people to offer a better structure for tweets that will help them develop their applications. Then you're the data provider for a huge ecosystem, with a feedback loop that ensures the data increases in value over time.

People seem to not be able to find specific value in twitter's data, but I can see huge potential. Here are some no-brainer examples:

- emergency management (this is being done, all over the world, and it works)

- data-mining comments about companies for feedback.

- recommendation services.

I can think of much more valuable ideas, but as I know people working on startups in this area, I won't share them.

I also don't understand why Twitter have not "app"-ed their platform or partitioned it so that companies can have their own subplatforms. Maybe it's because the official clients are terrible at handling such data.

Man, I could go on... but what a challenge it will be to turn this mess into something meaningful.




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