As Twitter continues to see skyrocketing growth, desktop and mobile phone clients are becoming a big business. Last month we broke the news that TweetDeck was asking some services for around $50,000 to appear in the client. Now we’ve gotten word that TwitterBerry, one of the most popular Twitter clients for BlackBerry phones, is running an auction for the coveted spot of “default media provider” for the app.
Orangatame (the company that makes TwitterBerry) is inviting select services to submit bids next week, at which point participants will be told the highest bid and will then be given a chance to submit one followup bid. Apparently Orangatame is looking to keep its options open in the future, as this bidding only grants the winner the default spot for three months.
Getting default position in a popular Twitter app can be enough to raise it from obscurity to popularity in a matter of months — one need only look at ImageShack-owned yFrog for proof, which leaped to popularity not long after becoming the default service for Tweetie, Twitterific, and a number of other apps (see graph below).
As I’ve written before, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with applications requiring payment for a service to get integrated, or to become the default. Given how many services that are out there that do exactly the same thing, developers need some way to choose, and it’s easy to see why they’d want to make some money in the process. However, it also opens the door to having an app littered by potentially inferior services with deep pockets. Developers will always claim to strive only to accept ‘cream of the crop’ services that are also willing to pay, but it might be hard to pass up a not-so-great service that’s willing to pay a significant premium.
Yet another company making money with Twitter. I wondering how Twitter as a company is going to get a piece of the pie.
May be you should have read the income plans by twitter here – http://www.tech...-users-in-2013/
Yeah agree. There’s definitely people with strong opinions on this. Let’s see how this plays out.
I’m sure they will start charging a % like Apple does for all it’s iPod related items.
Jon
Good question Nick. I’ve heard a few ideas come from them, but nothing solid yet.
I’m really excited to see how they start making money. They’ve had huge amounts in investments, so those that got in early on that are going to bank once Twitter starts rolling in it.
shamelessplug:
on that note. i am now accepting bids for @twitbin, whomever would like to be the “default media provider” can contact me at http://twitbin.com
/shamelessplug
anyway good for them. building apps takes lots of time, energy, and resources. it aint cheap.
”twitter experiencing skyrocketing growth” – just because techcrunch says so, twitter is still below facebook not only in size, but also in growth rate
oops, forgot http://siteanal...m+facebook.com/
How is 1164% increase smaller than 248%?
Quoting your own source here
“Given how many services that are out there that do exactly the same thing, developers need some way to choose, and it’s easy to see why they’d want to make some money in the process. However, it also opens the door to having an app littered by potentially inferior services with deep pockets.”
This strikes me as a pretty ill-based concern.
First, if you’re going to claim the services in the ecosystem are basically interchangeable, you really can’t fear being tied to “inferior” ones.
More importantly, I think market forces probably preclude the possibility anyway. A service, e.g. Twitter, would likely not take a pay-off and endorse an obviously poor add-on application. That is, unless it doesn’t think best customer experience is tied to its profit-making potential.
At least we’re not getting stuck with the bill.
If it comes down to quality, Zannel should be the default. They are clearly better than yFrog or any of the others.
TwitterBerry is terrible on my BlackBerry Storm. I’d rather use Twitter on my mobile browser than use the app.
The Facebook app for BlackBerry is much smoother.
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