Does the world need another twitter client?
it certainly is not about being the first out there
When we pitch our little project, we often get the same reply: “Isn’t that what Plaxo does?” I often think the answer to that question is “no”, “not really”, or maybe even “partly”, depending on how deep into the industry the guy we’re talking with is. But lately I’ve been thinking of answering “maybe”, or even “yes”. So what?
Twitter has been around for some years now (and the fact that despite being one of the greatest things ever they still don’t have a business model that the people we eventually pitch to would like to hear, but that would be the suject of another post) and since the beginning there have been many ways to interact with it, specially desktop clients. And I mean many.
Well, it turns out despite having endless ways to interact with twitter, there were these guys who thought there weren’t enough ways already and came up with the wonderful Tweetie. And guess what, it turns out that after a couple of months, Tweetie is the third most popular way of interacting with Twitter on the desktop (the second if we don’t count their own web), that is according to twitsats. According to the people around me, it’s just the Twitter client many people had been waiting for.
I don’t want to mean that we’re going to be the same thing on the personal information management arena (sure as hell we’re trying to), but I just can’t help but picture these guys pitching their product:
“What? Another twitter client? And you have to pay for it? Go home, kids”
So… did the world need another twitter client? It looks like it did. Plaxo or LinkedIn have been around way longer than Twitter, and the real truth is that everybody signed up but nobody actually uses them, or at least no more than eventually. Maybe the world just needs another contact manager.