Twitter Shuts Down Thunderclap, New Tweet-Boosting Service
Twitter appears to be building a very nice business on the basis of its ability to promote tweets. The last thing it needs is anyone else coming in and using its platform to offer a competing service.
Context & Ripple Effects
The shutdown is the third beat in a pattern Twitter has been running since 2010, when it warned rival ad players to tread carefully around its nascent promoted-products business. In March 2011 it dropped what TechCrunch called the ecosystem hammer, telling developers not to compete with it on clients, and two months later it rolled its own photo-sharing service into a market third parties had filled.
First-order effects
- Thunderclap's users — campaigns that coordinated mass tweeting for reach — lose their tool overnight, and any developer building an amplification service on Twitter's API learns that access can be withdrawn when the feature competes with Twitter's own promoted-tweet revenue.
Second-order effects
- Brands and advocacy groups seeking coordinated tweet bursts are pushed toward Twitter's own paid promotion products, concentrating advertising demand in-house; other third-party developers face a forced choice between pivoting to the data-and-verticals lane Twitter outlined in its 2011 directive or risking the same takedown.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Twitter completes its consolidation from open platform to closed media business — one gatekeeper controlling both distribution and the only sanctioned way to buy reach — with each removal narrowing the independent developer ecosystem around it.
The trend: Consumer internet platforms are monetizing by absorbing or eliminating the third-party services built on top of them, and Twitter's successive takedowns since 2010 are an early template.