Now that Twitter seems to have mostly recovered from the major service outages that it had seen in the past, a recent string of new implementations seem to suggest that Twitter is seeking to keep its users on their own site rather than using a client.
Since the addition of the “Lists” feature, according to alexa.com, both time spent on site as well as pageviews per visit have increased. Both these stats seemed to be in a slight decline over the prior month. While there was a spike, it will take time to see if this spike is sustained.
Mashable reported yesterday that Twitter has now added a ReTweet function.
While these features have slightly increased my Twitter.com usage, these alone won’t be enough to keep me from my Twitter clients. And I use a lot of them. For different reasons, on different platforms.
One reason that is likely for Twitter to be implementing many of these features to their site is to bring users back, and I would suspect it is in hopes of soon monetizing the service. I think Twitter would have a difficult time monetizing if users are using clients rather than the site itself. It might also have a harder time securing investors if its traffic numbers are trending negatively, which seems to have been happening since the massive traffic spikes it saw in February and March.
The problem that I see with what Twitter is doing is that it is in fact not innovating at all, but merely copying the competition, implementing features that have long been the reason that people have moved to clients like Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, Tweetie, etc.
In the short term, Twitter may lure some users back to their homepage with these “new” features, but in the long run, I believe the only way that they can build sustainable user engagement on the site is to really innovate. Create new features that the community has not yet come up with without diluting the simplicity of Twitter.
Have Twitter’s new features brought you back to the site more often?
