There Are No Good Guys On the Internet

Twitter’s managed to come out of this Search, plus Your World shitstorm smelling (mostly) like roses, and it’s because they’ve been able to treat Google the same way everybody else seems to: like a sacrosanct public good. I don’t think that anyone’s arguing that Twitter results aren’t more relevant than Google+ results right now or even that they should be available. And I’m not arguing that Google’s behavior in this hasn’t been shady — after all, Eric Schmidt is involved. But it’s not like Twitter has been a good citizen of the internet either. Not even close.

So when Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray calls out Google’s decision to integrate Google+ into search results a “bad day for the internet” I marvel at the hypocritical stones on the guy. To wit:

• Twitter’s data firehose — the one that they want featured prominently in Google results — is only available if you’re willing to pay money for it.
• Twitter’s got a shitty track record on data portability. Just try to get your data out of them.
• Twitter’s vacillating stance on third-party Twitter clients is straight-up chutzpah.
• Twitter has shown a complete willingness to fuck with the user experience (viz: the Dickbar fiasco, constant redesigns)

How has any of this been “good” for the Internet?

You can argue, and I would agree, that Twitter has the right to do these things. Everyone on Twitter agreed to play by Twitter’s rules at some point, even if they did so before they understood how important Twitter would become to them. But we now exist in a world where Twitter is deeply important to many people — and Twitter has been pushing their importance in the world hard. To hear Twitter tell it, without them there would be no Arab Spring. They’ve quickly become a public good just like Google, at least in the minds of their users.

Twitter knows this. Which is why they’ve been, so far, willing to push back on some of their more offensive actions. They backed down on the dickbar. They (kinda) backed down on their developer stance. But at some point they’ve got to start answering for the $1 billion they raised. And they’ve clearly got their finger on a switch that doesn’t mean anything good for users.

But Twitter needs to make money, and the only way for them to make serious money is by somehow monetizing your data. The expired Google deal illustrates that perfectly. Twitter made $100 million selling the content its users created. And now that that deal doesn’t exist anymore — and it doesn’t really matter which side backed out — Twitter is somehow acting like this data was freely available all along. Which is bullshit. If Twitter really cared about this, they’d open up their data stream to anyone who wanted it, not just those with big pockets. But if they did that they’d be killing the goose that they’re pretty sure is going to lay a golden egg at some point.

Twitter’s acting like they’re the good guys, but just because they may have built some windows into their walls doesn’t mean they’re not trying to protect their garden as fiercely as Facebook does.