As I am writing this post Seesmic is launching in New york a new app called Seesmic Look
I have no intention of reviewing it, you go ahead and read Mashable or Techcrunch articles about it.
What I want to point out here is that I’m happy. I’m happy that this launch somehow confirms my predictions.What are those?
Well, everyone’s expecting the much hyped advertising program from Twitter.But we also know Twitter is not about Twitter.com website.It’s mostly about people using Twitter in various clients just like Seesmic. These clients make calls into the popular Twitter API in order to fetch your status updates or to tweet on your behalf.
So let’s put together the input data we have so far:
1) Twitter growth has apparently stalled
2) Twitter launch of an advertising-based revenue model is imminent (I suspect an announcement on Apr 14th)
3)Twitter advertising could only be displayed on the Twitter.com website which is only a small part of the whole ecosystem
Well, if you think a bit about this context you’ll quickly realize that unless Twitter pulls out a method to monetize the clients using it’s precious API they are pretty much losing a big slice of the pie.
It’s up to them how they will be doing this, I suppose (this is mearly an assumption) they will either have the client owners pay for the API usage (just like they did with the firehose) or have them display their ads in some way.
What’s the link between this and Seesmic look? The whole point of Seesmic Look is to “bring Twitter to the masses”. Want to put it another way?
If my assumptions are true, LeMeur is kissing Twitter buttcheeks big time just to get some privileged position in this client game!
Otherwise tell me a good reason for a $12M funded company who’s failed once, then switch business and succeed to be in the top 3, who now has got a Twitter (+Facebook) client on all major desktop and mobile devices to roll out such an app.
One more thing to figure out yourselves: Why deploy a Silverlight (Microsoft) app when you already have a native Windows client? Wnd why Silverlight when you address the masses? I mean Silverlight has a little over 25% penetration rate!
What do you think?
