I’ve been writing a series of posts that emphasize the huge potential of Twitter allowing developers to place apps in tweets, but they all hinge on a critical issue: trust. Apps in tweets eliminate the need for click-throughs, because everything is now already in Twitter. If Twitter is the portal for a new generation of ecommerce, then everyone will have to implicitly trust what they find in Twitter. Most users will think that Twitter as a company is part of their transactions performed in tweet apps.

This confusion is similar to the origin of ecommerce back in the early dotcom. People would come to the sites I helped build at Andover.net, click a banner ad, and then make a purchase at the site the ad sent them too. When they had a problem with the purchase, they would complain to us, because they thought they had made the purchase from our site. This confusion of exactly where they “were” at any time on the web resolved after a few years, but it is sure to resurface with apps in Tweets.

How will Twitter deal with this trust issue? My fear is that they will try to strictly control who gets to build apps in tweets. The early stages of this attempt at control can be seen with Twitter Cards. These are the current precursors to apps in Tweets. Unlike the rest of the Twitter API, which is open to anyone with no approval required, developers must apply before they are even allowed to try working with Twitter Cards.

I understand Twitter’s point of view on this. They need to make sure reliable developers are building apps in tweets that users will think are actually coming from Twitter, but strict control and pre-approval is not how the Twitter API became so successful. I started working with the Twitter API 3 years ago exactly because there was no approval process, unlike Facebook, which played favorites with who it would allow to build apps. I’m certain that the same thing happened with the hundreds of thousands of developers who are working now with the Twitter API. I hate to be negative, and I really, really want to apps in tweets to succeed, but if Twitter has to approve each developer and app individually, the likelihood of failure is high.

So this is the pressure point around which the future of apps in tweets hinges. Twitter somehow has to find a way to maintain trust and security with apps in tweets while allowing a wide range of people to build these apps. If they decide to only allow venture funded companies in the Valley, or companies who make large ad buys to build apps in tweets, they will never reach critical mass.

A fundamental barrier for all online advertising has been the click-through. Whether a link is attached to a banner ad or is displayed in a tweet, it has no value unless users click on it. The percent of clicks per display of the link is called the click-through rate, and in every medium and genre it has always steadily declined. Wikipedia says that the average for online ads is now down to .2% – .3%. When Twitter announced promoted tweets in 2010, it claimed that click throughs on tweets were as high as 5%.

I haven’t seen any recent stats on tweet click through rates, but it is a safe bet that they have declined from that amazing height. That is a basic truth of online advertising: users become less likely to click links as they recognize them as ads. In the case of display advertising, this is called banner blindness. I’m willing to bet that something similar has happened with the various promoted ad products Twitter uses.

Which brings us to the beauty of apps in tweets. If the content the advertiser is trying to get users to reach is in the tweet, there is no click needed. Of course, an app within a tweet won’t be able to recreate an entire website, but it removes this crucial first hurdle. If a click through rate was 1%, skipping the click increases the contact between the user 100 fold. It’s an advertiser’s dream.

But here is the downside, advertisers follow Darwinian principles, creating more and more spectacular displays of plumage to attract a partner. The progression is easily predictable: first apps in tweets will be closed, then they will start appearing pre-opened in each tweet, then tweet apps will be able to auto-play audio files, then video files. It takes a strong will to say no to advertisers. As a former Dotcom CTO, I know the struggle well. Will Twitter be able to control its advertisers in tweets? Or will users develop app blindness?

One thing that puzzles me about apps in tweets is figuring out how to get them there. I understand how Twitter apps in websites or on mobile work. A developer builds a website or mobile app, and adds code that interacts with the Twitter API and probably a database on their server as well. That app then can display tweets and perform actions on the user’s Twitter account. It’s a traditional client server model, with the Twitter API as the server.

The idea of putting apps into tweets twists the topology around in such an odd, chicken and egg way. How do you get an external app from the developer (client) into a tweet running on Twitter (server)? I know this won’t happen with Twitter.com making 3rd party apps available somehow on their pages. There was a brief time when Twitter pretended to promote 3rd party apps on their sidebar, but even then they were hand-picked from fellow Valley VC funded companies. A toolbar of external apps on Twitter.com would be very sweet, but that will never happen.

The most logical scenario I can see for getting apps into tweets is for websites and mobile tools to send out tweets with their own apps embedded. Here’s an example. Amazon.com can put a button next to each book that says “Tweet this book”. When the user clicks this, Amazon would use the Twitter API to send a tweet to the user’s Twitter account with an Amazon order form app embedded. Other users on Twitter.com would see this tweet and be able to interact with the Amazon app inside. Just about every ecommerce site could adopt this model. Instead of tweets having links that send you to an external website, sites can have links that inject themselves into Twitter.

So we end up with an inverted model where the external site is the server, and it delivers content to be displayed on Twitter.com acting as the client. Of course, the Twitter API mediates the entire operation, so it is sort of the server for its own client.

OMG, it’s a perpetual motion machine!

One benefit of running an app within Twitter.com is that it will eliminate the need for the OAuth dance. That is the complex exchange that goes on between a website and the Twitter API when the user logs into Twitter through the website. This communication is necessary to deliver a set of authorization keys that can be used by the site to get the Twitter account information for the user.

You’ve seen this dance before, even if you didn’t realize exactly what was happening. You are on a website, and see a button that says . Clicking that button takes you to a Twitter controlled page where you can give permission for the site that sent you there to operate on your behalf. When you then give permission, you are sent back to the site to continue where you left off. This whole procedure confuses both the user and the developer who has to implement it. One way of measuring how big a hurdle this is for Twitter API developers is the fact that my tutorial on using OAuth is the number one visited page on this site. It gets about 30% of all of my site traffic, even though it was written 2 years ago. There is no doubt that the OAuth dance is a pain for everyone involved.

As part of making it possible for developers to run apps within tweets, Twitter will have the chance to streamline this whole process. The Twitter page will already know who the logged in user is. It is just a matter of making this available to the application code running within the tweet.

There are several possible to ways to implement an API that passes this info. I can’t predict exactly how this will be done, but I am sure it will have to be done. Think about what would happen otherwise. A user who is logged into Twitter sees an app in a tweet, and tries to interact with it. Will Twitter then send that user to another sign-in page to log in again? That makes no sense. There will have to be a transparent way to let the app discover who the current user is.

Explicit authorization by the user will still be necessary before the app can change the user’s Twitter account or tweet on their behalf, but the UI for that will also have to be handled by Twitter. Otherwise the clean and consistent experience Twitter is striving for will not be achieved. I handle UI issues like this all the time in the website apps I build for clients. I’m sure Twitter can figure out how to make it happen. They have no choice.

Putting these implementation details aside, the real take away is that apps within tweets will be easier to build and easier for users to interact with. That has to be good for everyone involved, and result in increased adoption and production of Twitter apps.

Now that I’ve relaxed and decided to embrace the idea of apps in tweets, the possibilities are amazing. What it all comes down to is ecommerce from within a tweet. That is the game changer. Right now tweets are only a pointer, not a destination. I can tell someone about a great restaurant, or book, or hotel, but then they have to click on the link inside the tweet to take action. What if I could tweet about a book I just read, and include an Amazon order form for that book within the tweet? Think that would increase the sales rate?

Now multiply that by every form of ecommerce, and realize that all of these application areas are open for commercial exploitation with tweets: hotel reservations, movie and concert tickets, music downloads, clothing purchases, stock trading. Basically the entire ecommerce field will get reinvented. Some current leaders will keep winning, like Amazon, but there will be many more new first movers in this space.

Yes, there are all kinds of issues about trust and security, but those exist on the web already. I remember when everyone was afraid to give their credit card to a website. Things are scary until they aren’t. Once they’re not, nobody worries about it. Anyone remember when microwaves were scary? Getting used to buying something from within a tweet will take a few months at the most.

Keep in mind that Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chairman, also runs the payment service Square. What an interesting possibility for an acquisition by Twitter. At the very least, he is well aware of the internal issues of online payments.

Right now everyone is looking at Twitter’s attempts to tighten their control over tweets as an advertising play. That may be what they’re thinking about, but as an entrepreneur and Twitter API developer, I’m thinking about all the money to be made within tweets.

“We want developers to be able to build applications that run within Tweets.”
- @Sippey post on changes to Twitter API

I’ve been through the usual round of emotions in reaction to one of Twitter’s periodic “adjustments” to the Twitter API access rules. Denial and anger took a few days. I tried bargaining with my contacts at Twitter HQ earlier this week. Depression was yesterday. Now I’m up to acceptance. What would it mean to actually build apps into tweets? It could be really cool. (Note to self: adopt stance of suspension of disbelief. Act as if Twitter can build something this big in a reasonable amount of time. ) Sorry, back to acceptance.

As I was saying, being able to add your own code to a potential base of 400 million tweets a day is a huge amount of new real estate. Developers won’t be able to resist this much fertile territory. If everything people now do on the web can be done inside tweets, then Twitter becomes the new web. Imagine a web suddenly opening up with no apps. Think some people will try to populate it?

Let’s be honest. Twitter is now the transport protocol for the Internet. If a huge percentage of the information packets are sent and received as tweets, then more content and functionality should be attached to those tweets. Instead of passively residing on websites, this content and functionality will have a date, sender, and multiple recipients attached. It is a paradigm shift, and those always breed new waves of development.

But won’t that make developers even more dependent on Twitter? Yes. Won’t Twitter be able to arbitrarily kill competitors and substitute their own apps? Yes. Isn’t this just another huge case of letting a thousand flowers bloom? Yes. The risks are clear. The rewards are too great to resist. If Twitter builds this, the developers will come. The VCs will follow. The land rush will happen.