Dear Twitter, please don’t kill your market

I just read Social Media Todays article and the developer group’s announcement of Twitter’s intention to immediately ban any form of recurring tweets. I’m alarmed and concerned because I love Twitter. And with this move, they are taking a giant step toward killing their market and ceding it to Facebook.

Let’s look at the facts:

• Twitter is going for the business market. They’ve already announced a plan for premium accounts and courted business through FAQs tailored to them.
  
  
• Twitter’s whole technology is built around the idea of a continuous, real-time stream of information, from which TWEETS FALL OFF.
  
  
• Bloggers, businesses, and anyone who actually wants to have a chance of being heard has to tweet the same message more than once. (Especially those who don’t have many thousands of followers.) If they don’t, the chances are miniscule of their tweet being seen by anyone, let alone large numbers of people. (See my last blog post, When is it spam?)
  
  
• Although repeats are annoying for client users, the latest stats suggest that a majority of users access through the Web site, where tweets will not be seen unless recurring tweets are allowed.
  
  
• Retweets aren’t enough, and recurring tweets help level the playing field. The larger your following, the better your chance of being retweeted. The combination of recurring tweets and hashtags gives tweeps with smaller followings a better chance of getting their message out, and building bigger followings.

It’s clear that many people use Twitter for social reasons. But a big part of the value on Twitter is its ability to surface new information. Twitter users are information junkies. Recurring tweets have a role to play in fulfilling that user goal.

I’ve blogged before about the fact that I think businesses bring real value to Twitter. Without businesses, Twitter becomes purely a social network, with a lot of competition. I’m not sure it’s 140ct and real-time nature will be enough to allow it to survive or thrive as just a social network. Not with all the competition in that arena. It’s grown in large part because of its ability to serve up information snippets and link to more information via a headline mechanism.

Bloggers (yes, they are businesses) and companies have a much greater reason to provide new and valuable information than individuals do. They have a strong reason to invest time and energy into making Twitter more vibrant, encouraging more conversations, providing more value through the Twitter feeds.

As far as I can tell, Twitter hasn’t looked at the facts about their market, their users, and their competition. Nor have they considered that there are technical solutions to the problem of users seeing duplicate tweets. They are a technology company, aren’t they?

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If Twitter is serious about keeping businesses on Twitter, then they have to continue to create a place that provides value to businesses. Removing recurring tweets from the picture SERIOUSLY undermines the value of Twitter for busineses.