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the people making twitter love twitter

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Dan Frommer on the new, new Twitter:

Twitter gets the little things. I love that the “home” icon on the Twitter app is a birdhouse. And that the pencil on the “compose” icon is a quill. Things like that make me smile and feel like the people making Twitter love Twitter. You can’t say that about a lot of software companies.

(Via SplatF w/Dan Frommer, “The new, new Twitter: 10 big takeaways.”)

Frommer also notes that, in addition to the new design, Twitter has updated TweetDeck and made it a native application for the Mac. “TweetDeck seems to have found a role as ‘Twitter Pro,’” he writes. I called for/predicted both of these things in my post on the TweetDeck purchase in May.

How awesome am I? Not very awesome at all, in fact, as TechCrunch reports that Twitter head of Platform Ryan Server, speaking at LeWeb encouraged developers to focus on analytics and enterprise for their third-party apps. This definitely signals that TweetDeck may be for power users, but Twitter might not be aiming for a full-on enterprise solution.

i was right: tweetdeck will be official twitter enterprise solution

So, I don’t get a chance to toot my own horn very often — and maybe this was a no brainer — but I was right about Twitter turning TweetDeck into an enterprise solution, a possibility I floated on Tuesday morning after news of the Twitter purchase started going around.

Last night TweetDeck founder Ian Dodsworth made the purchase official on the TweetDeck blog and spelled out future plans for the service:

The mainstream Twitter user-base is well catered for by twitter.com and the official mobile clients. And by becoming part of the official platform, TweetDeck will now fill that role for brands, influencers, the highly active and anyone that just needs ‘more power’.” (Emphasis is all me.)

On the Twitter blog, Dick Costolo also spelled the TweetDeck strategy:

This acquisition is an important step forward for us. TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about. In order to support this important constituency, we will continue to invest in the TweetDeck that users know and love. (Again, emphasis is mine.)

As I said in my Tuesday post, I am excited to see Twitter keep TweetDeck going and move in this direction. Giving companies and power users a platform with a direct connection to Twitter will open up a lot of possibilities in terms of metrics and finding true influencers. However, there are a lot of smart companies who have made and continue to make great strides in this space. It will be easy for a souped-up version of TweetDeck to knock off the likes of HootSuite and CoTweet. Going up against the likes of Radian6/SalesForce will be tougher. But, I have a feeling Twitter won’t be going after these larger enterprise companies, but instead will be satisfied killing off the smaller players.

twitter bought tweetdeck. now what? (hint: think enterprise)

Now that Twitter has unofficially officially bought TweetDeck, the question remains: “What the heck are they going to do with it?”

The accepted narrative of the purchase is that this was a defensive move by Twitter. That is, they picked up TweetDeck in order to prevent UberMedia, owner of many other Twitter clients that aren’t made by Twitter, from snatching up TweetDeck and in turn snatching more Twitter market share. Under this premise, it would be perfectly understandable if Twitter simply decided to shutter TweetDeck, kindly ask its existing user base to move over to the official Twitter app and pay Ian Dodsworth to please stop working (or at least work on something non-Twitter related, maybe his new gold house and his rocket car?)

Personally, I don’t like that idea. I don’t like the idea of paying someone good money — hell, great money — just so you can take their product apart and ask them to go away. If I were at Twitter, (alright, pause for a good laugh) I would be pushing to turn TweetDeck into an Enterprise-level software aimed at companies currently managing their social media streams through products like CoTweet and HootSuite. After all, TweetDeck already has many of the features these services have — scheduling tweets, list management, multiple accounts, and access to other social services.

Imagine if Twitter could combine the services TweetDeck already offers with the ability to purchase and manage promoted tweets and accounts within the system; deep statistics on click-throughs, reach and impressions; real influence data on users and real-time conversation monitoring. And that’s just off the top of my head.

To me, turning TweetDeck into a product like that is much more interesting than just shit-canning the whole thing. But, it also represents some significant mission drift for Twitter and it might not be something they want to get into. After all, the enterprise race is moving quickly and companies like SalesForce/Radian6 have already made huge strides in mining social stream for data. It’s unlikely Twitter will be able to catch up in this area, but it could find a nice middle ground servicing smaller companies and power users that can’t pay thousands of dollars for a heavy enterprise solution.

One piece of advice for Twitter: If you decide to move forward with TweetDeck, please for the love of all that is holy, get it off of Adobe Air. I don’t much care whether you make it a web app, a desktop app or a frickin’ ham sandwich, but please no more Adobe Air. Nothing, nothing, good ever comes out of Adobe Air. It simply turns good apps into garbage.