Twitter's mistake

Twitter this week decided to stop feeding tweets to LinkedIn. They still allow LinkedIn to feed tweets to Twitter. I think that these moves are mistakes for Twitter. 

When providers of competing services cooperate, the race is to the bottom. That is, to the foundational level, the lowest layer of the system. Microsoft and IBM have been circling each other for years, attempting to cooperate on authentication services. Microsoft is willing to make RACF work with ActiveDirectory, as long as RACF is the authoritative source and ActiveDirectory is merely a client. Microsoft, in turn, is willing to make ActiveDirectory work with RACF, as long as ActiveDirectory is the authoritative source and RACF is the client. Both IBM and Microsoft want to be the base for authentication and are unwilling to yield that position to another.

Similar dances occur in the virtualization world. Microsoft is willing to host Linux in its environments (run by a Windows hypervisor) but is not willing to let Windows run on a foreign hypervisor. (In this specific situation, the dance is asymmetric, as Linux is more than happy to host others or run as a client.)

Twitter, in its move to kick out LinkedIn, has gotten the dance backwards. By turning off the feed to LinkedIn, it has removed itself from the bottom of the hierarchy. (Perhaps "center" is a better description of the desired position among social networks. Let's change our term.)

Twitter and LinkedIn compete, in some sense, in the social network realm. They have different client bases (although with a lot of overlap) and they have different execution models. Twitter users send short (hopefully pithy) blurbs to their followers. LinkedIn users describe themselves and look for business opportunities. Yet both sets of users look for attention, and both Twitter and LinkedIn compete for eyeballs to feed to advertisers.

Okay, that last sentence was a bit more picturesque than I expected. But let's press on.

As I see it, social networks live in an ocean of competitors. They cannot exist on their own -- witness Microsoft's "Live" network that is closed to others. I visit from time to time, but only because I need the Microsoft LiveID. It seems a lonely place.

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn tolerate each other. From LinkedIn, I can post messages to my LinkedIn and my Twitter networks. With the Seesmic app, I can post messages to Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes I post a message on only one network; it depends on the tone and content of the message.

The best place for a social network is the center of a person's attention. (This is a game of attention, after all.) Twitter's move pushes me out of Twitter and encourages me to spend more time in LinkedIn, sending messages to LinkedIn and occasionally Twitter. The odds of me sending a Twitter-only message are less than before.

And that's why I think it was a mistake for Twitter.