There are exactly zero times I wished I could buy something from a Tweet with a button. Given that limited observation of buyer behavior, and knowing full well Twitter wishes to make profit, I'm assuming these buttons will be forced into my public stream somewhere, somehow. Some people on here think these buttons will be placed there by Twitter via ads, but I have another idea:<p>Provide a micropayment channel program where, when I retweet a purchase button, I get part of the revenue share. Use cryptocurrencies to implement the feature. See @tipdoge for reference.
I'm actually impressed they found a way to monetize their platform that doesn't involve obtrusive ads. This seems like a good source of income for them and their clients, and as long as they don't force you to follow commercial accounts, it will be almost invisible to anyone who doesn't want to see it.<p>I'm cautiously optimistic.
it is a big conundrum if your core product, through its simplicity, is really great.<p>you hire all these product people, have all these investors, but any direction you can take the product actually makes it worse against its initial, great core use.<p>twitter as a protocol is on a level with smtp - a lucky strike, hitting a need, something for the ages. journalists, media, etc. love it. RSS on a whole new level.<p>but twitter as a product company? smtp is a not a profit model, you need to have real, closed products - hence the API limits, hence all this other bull. they have a narrow scope hit product and will kill it by making it broad. a little bit like google and search, put ads on it, done, the rest is noise driven by boredom and/or panic (we need to justify our existence!).<p>twitters design team is bigger than most startups - and for what? the whole slack team fits into the twitter reception area and covers how many platforms, apps, use cases by now?<p>you threw a lucky punch with a communication channel/protocol, but now you're stuck. aren't we happy that the smtp or unix guys as a whole didn't try the same. "monetize".
It would be interesting to see if content writers can promote their content through this to earn money through micro-payments.
Likely Steps:
1. Capture attention in 140 characters.
2. Provide a good deal for the article/content at a small price<p>Just being optimistic about news, article writers. I guess we might soon see Economist stories with nice 140 character titles and eye-catchy pictures with a buy button to read full article, post which it's added to your twitter shelf.
I wonder if this just might prove to be the payment mechanism needed for such content consumption. Somewhat similar to the app-store economy, twitter might become the content-store. Let's see...<p>Though I hope the dominant commerce part is kept as a separate tab perhaps like "Discover" tab, as I guess I wouldn't want to have my twitter stream as a series of ads. One or two "buy" tweets might be ok though I think... Will have to wait and watch how this goes.
See Chirpify[1], who has since pivoted. I don't know if that pivot was because of the idea or because Twitter decided it made more sense to be an ad wall than a platform.<p>I really, truly do not understand Twitter's thinking. I'm sure on someone's spreadsheet of imaginary numbers it looks more attractive to be a billboard, but Twitter had the opportunity to be a true platform. A platform gives you control. It's a longer-term play, but my goodness the opportunities missed. Including this one, which could have been in play years ago.<p>Whether people will actually use this feature is a whole other question.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/sell-simply" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/sell-simply</a><p>Edit: Clarify first P.
In an incredible turn of timing, I created a mockup of a Facebook icon for the exact same functionality about six hours ago:<p><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/sed9ewxz25turey/Screenshot%202014-09-08%2017.32.03.png?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/sed9ewxz25turey/Screenshot%202014-...</a>
I think one of my favorite things about this is that it actually makes product information available in the meta tags.<p><meta property="twitter:item:variant1:id" value="n6NDAWFNqjkNZftJWq0BQw==" />
<meta property="twitter:item:variant1:title" value="Small" />
<meta property="twitter:item:variant1:inventory_count" value=1 />
<meta property="twitter:item:variant1:price" value=75000000 />
<meta property="twitter:item:variant1:tax_category" value="included_in_price" />
<meta property="twitter:item:variant1:last_updated" value=1409259500000 />
<meta property="twitter:item:variant1:attribute1:text" value="Small" />
This could become big. Imagine celebrities tweeting buy link for their album or donation links when some calamity strikes or AMZN/Flipkart launching an exclusive deal/product on twitter or imagine launch of a new book/phone/car and tweeting buy button to prebook it. This could take impulse buy to a whole new level. Has Twitter finally found a viable business model ?
I wonder if there's a way to generalize this so any text or image can have metadata about purchasing the exact product. Something like a shorter UPC but with a non-intrusive reader embedded everywhere offering you to buy the product through manufacturer-controlled channels (varying depending on what country you are in).<p>You "just" need to get enough users to install the scanning software; maybe the next iPhone will come with Apple Shopping that scans all text you see and all images for the metadata/watermarks. As it detected a product, the new second $ button lights up. Press down on it for a second, and the product information pops up (Apple Shopping knows your size/address/credit card already of course). Hold it down for a few seconds longer, and you've made your purchase. Don't, and a few weeks later maybe the seller gets to send you a 10% off coupon.<p>Actually, Amazon's phones might already have something like that, letting you scan a bar code in a physical shop but purchase from Amazon.
Any app/website with a large user base should probably add this feature. The main value here, compared to simply dropping an ecommerce link in a tweet (the current use case), is piggy backing payment and fulfillment on top of the existing twitter user account.
Lots of people enjoy shopping, so this isn't as obviously bad of an idea as some of the comments here imply. Open question whether this will be more like "hanging out at the mall" or "watching QVC."
This is the first positive move I've seen from Twitter in a long time as far as building a sustainable business.<p>[edit] I say this after having tried every single one of their ad products without any success.
Let's hope that the selling-out of Twitter will give a nudge to its open decentralized competitors... I'm not holding my breath, but who knows ? I still dream of an XMPP Twitter...
The question on my mind is this: how can this possibly make anyone any money, given Apple's 30% cut on in-app purchases? I seriously doubt Apple would give that up.
My main concern is security. When Twitter stores your payment information it will be easy to buy something with a single click. But I've seen way too many Twitter hacking going on when I look at friends' timelines. If tweets like 'How I lost 100 lbs in 3 months! Click > bit.ly/youwillbehacked' can be posted without too much effort, these same hackers could buy stuff for free by just hacking into your Twitter account.
A way to bet on a sport/game via Twitter would be an interesting thing to do. Couple of months ago, I actually looked for ways to do it around the Twitter's cards API but never managed to get beyond the initial thoughts of doing so.
Not sure how many people would like to associate their credit card information with their Twitter profiles. Maybe they can include other sensible options like Bitcoin?
Don't we all have a friend or two who tries to sell you stuff while we're hanging out with friends on a night out?<p>That's what buy ads feel like on social networks.
After seeing this, I had a thought what if FB also brings 'buy' buttons on similar lines where pages can post items with a price tag and 'buy' button? It will surely be a nice revenue stream. Both FB and Twitter have an incredible reach. If Twitter can bring this experience about in a non-intrusive way, then it's a win-win for everyone.