Provide a micropayment channel program where, when I retweet a purchase button, I get part of the revenue share. Use cryptocurrencies to implement the feature. See @tipdoge for reference.
as well at turn the social network into a cesspool.
If something isn't interesting, or doesn't earn anyone money, people won't retweet it.
And now that I think of it, also books and concert tickets. One thing that frustrates me endlessly about fiction authors is they don't curate mailing lists. For whatever reason -- and they must have tested it -- amazon does not do a good job of informing you of new releases from authors you've purchased. I have a handful of authors I like enough that I buy everything they write. The smarter ones curate email lists to help me do that, but I think twitter often serves that purpose for authors and bands. So if they could sell me concert tickets or their new releases inline I may well buy.
But there are a huge number of times when a corporation has wished it could make it super easy for you to make a snap purchasing decision.
This is the equivalent of a an "impulse" rack of merch at the checkout line at the grocery store or a gas station.
All they need are enough people (less than 5% I'd assume) to use it to become commonplace in your feeds. I knew it eventually come to this.
"Announcing super concert 2,000 is open for ticket purchases! Click here now to get your!!! ONLY 5,000 slots available!"
I'm cautiously optimistic.
I hope they will be happy enough with the button's results to not jump to other, more irritating changes. And also hope that this is not just a door for some future ads spike.
The downside is that it would be quite one-off, the interest would die quickly.
Promoted Tweets are quite intrusive already...
you hire all these product people, have all these investors, but any direction you can take the product actually makes it worse against its initial, great core use.
twitter as a protocol is on a level with smtp - a lucky strike, hitting a need, something for the ages. journalists, media, etc. love it. RSS on a whole new level.
but twitter as a product company? smtp is a not a profit model, you need to have real, closed products - hence the API limits, hence all this other bull. they have a narrow scope hit product and will kill it by making it broad. a little bit like google and search, put ads on it, done, the rest is noise driven by boredom and/or panic (we need to justify our existence!).
twitters design team is bigger than most startups - and for what? the whole slack team fits into the twitter reception area and covers how many platforms, apps, use cases by now?
you threw a lucky punch with a communication channel/protocol, but now you're stuck. aren't we happy that the smtp or unix guys as a whole didn't try the same. "monetize".
Twitter is a service. Services need money. It's a simple as that.
Twitter should be just like email, not this one monopoly controlling everything. It’s sad that that’s the way it is.
they need money, sure. but not just to operate and make a nice profit, they need to grow, they need blowout quarter after blowout quarter. impossible with this simple and clean core product. hence doom on the horizon. just look at all the bad feedback they're getting for their feed changes. core audience hates it. won't bring new users. stuck.
twitter could/should be run like craisglist or reddit. hardcore maintainence mode. neat little business. but no VC will ever allow it.
I agree that it's a conundrum for them, but with this solution at least they're trying to do it in a non-obtrusive way that doesn't jeopardize the entire platform.
um.. UNIX started out as a closed-source commercial OS.
Just being optimistic about news, article writers. I guess we might soon see Economist stories with nice 140 character titles and eye-catchy pictures with a buy button to read full article, post which it's added to your twitter shelf. I wonder if this just might prove to be the payment mechanism needed for such content consumption. Somewhat similar to the app-store economy, twitter might become the content-store. Let's see...
Though I hope the dominant commerce part is kept as a separate tab perhaps like "Discover" tab, as I guess I wouldn't want to have my twitter stream as a series of ads. One or two "buy" tweets might be ok though I think... Will have to wait and watch how this goes.
One such thing would be an eBook or similar that you'd buy from someone you know or know of on Twitter.
I really, truly do not understand Twitter's thinking. I'm sure on someone's spreadsheet of imaginary numbers it looks more attractive to be a billboard, but Twitter had the opportunity to be a true platform. A platform gives you control. It's a longer-term play, but my goodness the opportunities missed. Including this one, which could have been in play years ago.
Whether people will actually use this feature is a whole other question.
[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/sell-simply
Edit: Clarify first P.
For clarity, I see Twitter as having this amazing potential as a message bus for both people, apps, and services. And I feel that potential has been squandered.
I'm unsure if this particular idea is going to pay off. But the general notion of an ecosystem of services hanging off of Twitter seems like the right one to me.
(This is usually where someone says app.net, and I say 'critical mass'.)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sed9ewxz25turey/Screenshot%202014-...
<meta property="twitter:item:variant1:id" value="n6NDAWFNqjkNZftJWq0BQw==" /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:title" value="Small" /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:inventory_count" value=1 /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:price" value=75000000 /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:tax_category" value="included_in_price" /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:last_updated" value=1409259500000 /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:attribute1:text" value="Small" />
You "just" need to get enough users to install the scanning software; maybe the next iPhone will come with Apple Shopping that scans all text you see and all images for the metadata/watermarks. As it detected a product, the new second $ button lights up. Press down on it for a second, and the product information pops up (Apple Shopping knows your size/address/credit card already of course). Hold it down for a few seconds longer, and you've made your purchase. Don't, and a few weeks later maybe the seller gets to send you a 10% off coupon.
Actually, Amazon's phones might already have something like that, letting you scan a bar code in a physical shop but purchase from Amazon.
Bolting on fulfillment to a twitter-purchase seems like a lot of work, but as another commentator said, I'm cautiously optimistic.
[edit] I say this after having tried every single one of their ad products without any success.
The Buy button in the feed might confuse some users though, since it will likely open the information panel.
That's what buy ads feel like on social networks.
Or is it just super cool to hate anything that could potentially generate some profit for Twitter?
Personally I think it's a good idea, for the brands and people I follow I know I'll only be getting shown the 'Buy' button for targeted items. However, I know my friends and family follow people who are clearly paid to promote a product.
Just to give you an example, Mark Wright is a reality TV celebrity here in England, and it's clear he is paid to promote diet supplements. if you check out his tweets you'll see that he's always retweeting, and taking pics of them (https://twitter.com/MarkWright_).
At the moment, conversion metrics are quite hard to get, however imagine if each one had a Buy button. It would be super easy to see which tweets leads to sales, which in turn will lead to a more aggressive sales pitch in order to bump up your conversions and maximise on referrals, as they'd likely to change to a percentage of sales rather than a fixed fee now that conversations are recordable.
There used to be a thing that you have to disclose your affiliation (think it was cmp.ly) but don't believe it ever got enforced, much like the EU Cookie Law, kind of.
Don't get me wrong, in my feed I trust people I follow and this won't happen. But for casual tweeters, it's just too easy to be exploited.
OcculusVR: New Rift is out! [Buy]
SXSW: Tickets on sale now! [Buy]
JKRowling: Just release my new Book [Buy]
Steam: [Some new Triple A game] is released [Buy]
RaspberryPi: New Pi Beowulf cluster available for purchase [Buy]
RedCross: [Some disaster] we need your support [Donate]
(I'm sure a donate will come along if this works)
Anywho, there have to be _tons_ of impulse buyers in the world. People will click
That would be a very relevant functionality : Twitter is all instant emotion and therefore a perfect platform for impulse donations !
app.net wanted more than I could afford to follow more than a few people, but the others look interesting. I'll give them a look.
edit: ello won't accept my email for the invitation request. Quitter looks like a clone of Twitter, and barely anyone in the public timeline speaks English. Not sure what to do with this.
edit 2: It looks like it took the request and sent me ten different confirmation emails while showing an error on the form. This doesn't make me feel good about the service.
No thanks
