Twitter’s ongoing experiments with recommendation technologies
Ahead of its IPO that some expect to see materialized on November 15, Twitter continues to make progress along the promising recommendation technologies route.
Event Parrot is a seemingly new experiment, another of its unannounced accounts, but labeled as such, followed initially by a small number of company employees, and based on Magic Recs’ procedure: send direct messages to users under certain circumstances. These types of experiments are very common within Twitter, and in many cases coalesce into interesting products or proposals.
Magic Recs recommends Twitter accounts based on the other accounts a user follows. Event Parrot does so in the case of important events, once again presumably using recommendation algorithms based on the community you are interested in, and possibly on some type of history of subjects you have shown an interest in via retweets, replies, or favorites.
In either case, recommendations reach users in the form of direct messages (DM), which potentially melds the “personal teletype” with the “invisible thread”, and connecting you to the subjects you are interested in, depending on questions such as the news subject or the activity on your network, and that is directly related to FoMO, Fear of Missing Out—highlighting the current transition we are in between receiving information via traditional media and Twitter. All this via a channel, the DM, that Twitter had used little until now, but that given our tight timelines, can come with a priority level higher than a simple tweet.
Twitter is continuing to look for value propositions that would appeal to an increasingly general public. The big difference between Twitter’s IPO and other comparable companies, apart from the size, is the cycle that Twitter current finds itself in. While companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Google went public just at the moment when their users’ adoption curve was entering a period of maturity, that is to say, they had already been through sustained periods of attracting new users at higher rates, Twitter’s case is very different: in none of the markets where it operates has Twitter become a real mainstream technology. The use of Twitter as a way of gauging the public’s preferences, or for interpreting the degree of interest in a topic are still somewhat skewed by the domination of early adopters.
As regards turnover and profits, we are basically talking here about the same thing: a company still in the early stages of its maturity, with proven and growing revenue streams, and many still to be explored: it has shown its value in a wide number of cases, and is in the phase of extending its appeal from being simply a largish advertising company, almost at Fortune 1000 level, to a much larger and general company by developing an API that will allow it to more efficiently design campaigns, as well as simpler self-management programs.
At the same time, Twitter has an interesting exploration and data analysis business for third parties, while there are indications that it is also developing some alternatives related to e-commerce. Taking into account this early phase in the development cycle, the company’s experiments in the recommendation segment, which has seen a good number of strategic acquisitions, creating a highly competitive team in the process, could provide some clues as to how it is going to capture a more mainstream market, or, in the case of musical recommendations, even some indication of potential revenue streams.
A company still in the early stages of adoption, with a product that is continually evolving, and a growing customer base: factors that could be interpreted negatively, as a problem, or as something positive, as an opportunity. How the market interprets this adoption stage will have a big influence on the IPO, and consequently, on the resources that Twitter will be able to access to put its strategy into practice.
