5by5’s Dan Benjamin interviewed Twitter’s former lead developer Alex Payne and the two discussed Payne’s views on the company and its business model.
Payne joined Twitter as its 8th employee, but he recently left to co-found the new startup BankSimple, where he acts as Chief Product & Technology Officer. As Twitter’s API Lead, Payne was responsible for interacting with third-party developers and creating many of the hooks that have made Twitter, well, Twitter.
Around the interview’s seven-minute mark, Payne talked about some of Twitter’s recent changes, noting that the company doesn’t have a lot of secrets right now; it makes a decision to do something and then announces it. When discussing the company’s new advertising model, this is what Payne had to say (emphasis ours):
“The move toward making advertising a core part of the business makes a lot of sense for the company’s future and profitability, but from my perspective, that’s one of the things that let me know that it was time for me to leave … because I wasn’t interested in working for an ad company. For a long time, the promise at Twitter was that we were going to look at different ways of making money, and to some degree I feel that hasn’t happened.”
This mirrors our observations about Twitter. Although the company initially made statements that it wouldn’t use advertising as its only business model, expansion into other areas — like offering developers paid-access to more services or more requests — hasn’t happened.
It will be interesting to see how the microblogging site continues to evolve in the future, given Payne’s departure and the growing tension between Twitter and some of its developers.
Much of Twitter’s success is directly tied to its API and the growing ecosystem of applications and application hooks that were created around the platform. The balance will be in defining and executing Twitter’s goals as a company with a business model, without alienating many of the people who have helped it become a behemoth in social communication.
Payne used an interesting phrase to describe what Twitter is becoming: an “interest graph.” We think that’s a very apt description for the role the service is carving out for itself. The question is no longer “What Are you Doing?” It’s now “What Topics Are We Talking About?” From that perspective, Twitter’s trajectory into an advertising-based business model makes even more sense.
What do you think about Payne’s interview and where Twitter is headed in the future? Let us know!
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Tags: alex payne, business models, dan benjamin, twitter, Twitter API