The Web’s Missing Interoperability
Courtesy of Ben Thompson, Stratechery
It was 2004, and Tim O’Reilly needed a name for his new conference, and so “Web 2.0” was hatched in a brainstorming session devoted to finding a name. A year later O’Reilly would flesh the concept out with his definitive 2005 post What is Web 2.0, but given the fact so many Web 2.0 applications were about creating platforms that were then made valuable with user-generated content, it feels appropriate that O’Reilly made a name first and added the content to justify it later. And, in the spirit of Web 2.0, I’m not going to quote O’Reilly’s article but rather the Wikipedia entry for a definition:
Web 2.0…refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatible with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.
Seventeen years on and there is more user-generated content than ever, in part because it is so easy to generate: you can type an update on Facebook, post a photo on Instagram, make a video on TikTok, or have a conversation on Clubhouse. That, though, points to Web 2.0’s failure: interoperability is nowhere to be found. Twitter, which has awoken from its years-long stupor to launch or announce whole host of new products, provides an excellent lens with which to examine the drivers of this centralization.
Super Follows and the Content-Creation Loop
While the specific details of Super Follows are still hazy, the idea of Twitter users being able to charge followers for special access makes all kinds of sense for Twitter the company. First, the items of value, particularly exclusive tweets or the ability to interact, are by definition exclusive to Twitter; only Twitter has tweets! Second, the best place to find Super Follows will be amongst your regular followers; access to the ideal user acquisition channel is built in. Third, Twitter will be able to make money coming and going: the obvious advertising mechanism for finding new Super Follows would be Twitter’s own ad products; Twitter could even make advertising “free”, collecting its payment from future subscription revenue.
This points to the first factor driving centralization: as I explained two weeks ago in Clubhouse’s Inevitability, the most compelling apps for user-generated content tie creation and consumption into a tight loop, bound together with network effects and presented with a feed that neither creators nor consumers want to leave. This isn’t nefarious, it’s simply good product design.
Revue and Distribution
The logic of Twitter getting into newsletters with its purchase of Revue is not quite as obvious, but still compelling: long-form content is very different from 280 characters, and there is a certain allure to a company like Substack that is completely focused on newsletters. At the same time, the most challenging part of building a subscription business is customer acquisition, and Twitter is an obvious channel to do so.*
This is the second factor driving centralization: in a world where distribution is free the real cost is user acquisition, which means it is often easier to give existing users new functionality than it is for a new service based on the functionality to acquire new users. The canonical example of this dynamic is Stories: while Instagram didn’t kill Snapchat, the audacity with which Facebook copied Stories stopped the latter’s growth, at least for a few years.
Business concerns are obviously a major driver here as well: ad-based services want to keep users on their own platform instead of sending them somewhere else, even if it incurs short-term costs; engagement is the recipe for long-term revenue growth.
Spaces and Social Graphs
I’m less convinced than many that Spaces, Twitter’s Clubhouse competitor, will crush the startup like Periscope, Twitter’s live streaming service, once crushed Meerkat. I think the audio streaming market is much larger, for one, and Clubhouse has much more of a head start. Still, I can understand the argument: when it comes to a social network the most compelling feature is if you know people using it, and Twitter already has an existing social graph, as well as a good idea of what you are already interested in based on whom you follow.
That is also why it is so important that Clubhouse incentivizes its users to import their contacts: the startup is bootstrapping a social network off of your phone’s address book, in stark contrast to Meerkat, which directly imported your Twitter contacts, right up until the date when Twitter cut it off. Twitter had learned its lesson from Instagram, which booted up its social network on top of the Twitter graph; Twitter eventually cut off Instagram in-line image sharing, but by then it was too late. To that end, the most Twitter could do to Clubhouse is stop its links from unfurling; it can’t stop Clubhouse’s notifications or use of contacts.
Censorship and Competition
New features are a welcome respite to the reason that Twitter is usually in the news: controversy and charges/pleas for censorship. Some folks want Twitter to control more speech, some want Twitter to control less, but nearly all are convinced that Twitter is on the side of their enemies. Still, to be fair, Trump supporters have the stronger argument in that regard, given the fact that Twitter suspended the former President’s account (a decision that I ultimately argued for, even though it was very close).
Read also Ben's Clubhouse’s Inevitability.
