Is Twitter growing up?

There are rumblings of some pretty big changes coming down the round for our favourite little microblogging service. The last week alone has seen the launch of Twitter for Blackberry, the acquisition of Tweetie (read: Twitter for iPhone) and a sneak peak of a brand new Twitter.com.

This all harks back to the tweet above from Twitter employee Alex Payne last year (since removed from the site), which suggests that advanced web-based features are on their way. Payne’s tweet also suggests moves that will encourage users to use the main website rather than the numerous third party apps that are readily availble.

A new direction?

Does this move away from third party developers signal a change in strategy for Twitter and, if so, what has caused this?

Unlike other social networks (read: Facebook), Twitter has always openly encouraged the use of its API by third party applications, many of which have added more sophisticated functionality and features. It seems that Twitter is now perhaps sensing that keeping users on the main site would be more beneficial and, as far as I can see, this can mean only one thing: monetisation.

Twitter has made a number of big hires in recent weeks on the business side of things and it seems the company is intent on building profits throughout 2010.

Twitter 2.0, whenever it arrives, will surely include new features, is likely to include the business accounts that were promised last year and will possibly reveal in full the monetisation policy that has been imagined and speculated about by commentators ever since the service started.

Is Twitter growing up? Who knows! But what is for certain is that interesting developments are afoot…

Danny Whatmough