What a week for Twitter.
The mircroblogging firm made nearly a dozen announcements this week, marking a huge shift in Twitter’s business strategy, starting with the fact that it now actually has a business strategy.
At its developer conference, codenamed Chirp, the company unveiled promoted tweets, new official mobile apps, an enhanced geo-tagging feature, a proprietary link-shortening function, live search on Bing and the sale of its archives.
“Twitter’s been under a lot of pressure to be a more transparent business,” said Augie Ray, senior social-networking analyst at Forrester Research. “Now the company has come to a point in its maturity where it’s starting to operate much more as a business and less as a startup.”
The new moves aren’t without critics. Some customers have found the promoted tweets to be intrusive. Third-party app developers are worried that Twitter is trying to put them out of business. And location-based apps like Foursquare and Gowalla can’t be too pleased that Twitter is planning to launch a similar service.
But Twitter has also been scrutinized for taking too long to unveil a roadmap. Developers weren’t sure where to invest their efforts, and analysts grew frustrated wondering when the company was going to grow up.
It appears that time has come.
Promoted tweets: By far the most significant announcement. When users search with select keywords, a tweet from a company that bought those keywords will appear at the top of the feed. Companies that currently feature ads on the site include Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500), Starbucks (SBUX, Fortune 500) and Sony Pictures.
Though some Twitter users predictably reacted negatively to the announcement, Ray said most of the early buzz from consumers was fairly supportive.
