A Week in Twitter: Lots of New Products, Lots of Blindsided Developers

By Chelsi Nakano (@chelkano) Jun 3, 2011

Twitter (news, site) headlines were hot this week with an acquisition and several new tools, such as a Follow button and a photo/video sharing feature. And while users of the platform can probably still be heard cheering, third party developers are left reaching for the Kleenex.

Twitter's New Follow Button is a Blessing for Businesses

In a move that's reminiscent of Facebook's Open Graph Protocol, Twitter's new Follow button enables users to subscribe to Twitter feeds directly from company and individual websites:

Twitter Follow Button

The big bonus here, obviously, is that you don't have to be on Twitter's site to interact with it or its users. This is a significant change for businesses, as they previously had to redirect users to their respective accounts on Twitter.com in order to gain new followers. As marketers have struggled to get audiences to engage with their brands via social media, sending them off to other websites to do so was more than just a little antithetical.

(Our full coverage here.)

Twitter Launches Own Photo Sharing Service

After years of leaving the photos and videos to third-party services like Twitpic, Twitter is launching its own tool. Now, photos and videos will be directly connected to tweets and viewable on Twitter.com without having to redirect. Twitter will also “surface the most popular videos and tweets” in a new section of the homepage.

Twitter's partner in technology is Photobucket, and pictures on Twitter will accordingly bear the tag “powered by Photobucket,” which will link to a page that allows users to further share.

Many were surprised that third party services like Twitpic were not consulted first — including Twitpic founder Noah Everett.

“We never heard from Twitter that they were building a photo feature,” Everett told TechCrunch. “We understand that Twitter owns and controls the platform, but a clearer roadmap from them and better communication would have been appreciated by us and all the developers. We’ve always had Twitter’s best interest in mind with building and running Twitpic, we would have hoped the same from Twitter, at least in the form of better communication.”

(Our coverage here.)

AdGrok Joins the Twitter Flock, Monetization Looms

Twitter threw down some dollars for AdGrok this week, a platform designed to help businesses manage their Google Adwords.

For AdGrok customers this means the end of the line, as the company will no longer be accepting new signups and ceased charging existing customers immediately after the news broke. As of June 30th, AdGrok servers will be officially dunzo.

The AdGrok purchase is yet another sign that Twitter is becoming a data-driven giant that no longer wishes to rely on third-party services, as well as a much more involved advertising platform.