Letter #7: Twitter A Identity And Social Capital Management
Letter #7: Twitter A Identity And Social Capital Management
How twitter can unleash the beast by becoming the consumer facing identity and social capital management system
As some of you already know, I am LONG Twitter(see my US stock holding pattern ) and feel that it has just started to scratch the surface of what is possible.
I have also been thinking about what twitter is upto and where it can potentially go. Here are some early thoughts
So whats new
Recently twitter announced a slew of new features including
Spaces : Clubhouse competitor
Subscriptions: Subscribe for
Exclusive tweets / content
Newsletter
Badge
Community
In January twitter also acquired revue, a newsletter company to let twitter users start newsletters
They have also reopened verification, so you can get that sweet sweet blue tick
Twitter has also started to hire aggressively in India, and their tech office in Bangalore has multiple open roles including Staff level.
Staff level roles are generally needed when you are willing to start large teams around that person, clearly indicating that Twitter has all the intentions to grow.
This definitely is a good sign because it shows that tech is finally becoming a big enough bottleneck. I expect many new features coming out of Twitter’s stable
Where is it going
I believe twitter is unleashing the beast with the power of its platform and could eventually go into Identity and Social capital management. Here are some of my early thoughts
Twitter as Identity Management
Once twitter starts mass verifying users, it would become perhaps one of the largest consumer facing identity management platform in the world. It would be bigger than many governments and will come with added social capital.
When someone says they are verified, you not only know who they are, but can also go and check out their profile.
There is a massive need for user identity verification especially in situations involving people to people contact. Eg Uber users in brazil need to validate via CPF(national ID ) if they want to pay via cash. This helps them establish trust. Think about using twitter globally
Other user cases could be
Is the person sending me the email the same as they claim to be
Is the person bidding for my furniture real
A lot of startups bootstrap on twitter network, eg: Substack shows you who amongst the people you follow on twitter has a substack. My own Substack had subscribers even before I sent my first newsletter
Imagine what could be done with high trust authentication.
Twitter as Social Capital Management
Whenever any influencer or content creator opens up another channel (Eg a new newsletter, a youtube channel, a blog) they end up recreating the entire network again. The need to gain the trust of not just the followers but also the platform.
While surely there are massive advantages of existing audience which follows the creator, there is always a huge leakage and the creator is subject to very different rules on each.
Eg: Even if you are extremely popular on twitter, you cannot take that social capital to say a mailchimp to send your newsletter. You need to “warm up” the system, hope your audience opens it, prey that spam filters don’t flag you, and if you have a shared IP hope all other providers are not doing something shady.
Mailchimp has no context of who you are or how you built your audience. There is no social capital associated with you.
But with twitter this could change. Twitter could use your social capital of one platform (say twitter) to jump start you on another (eg newsletter). It can use your social capital for more than just growth hack.
Will it matter to small time creators
While small social capital on one mode of communication may not matter to people, a multi modal platform may matter in aggregate.
The biggest advantage of this is that as people start deriving more value from the system, the incentive for bad behaviour becomes less You also become super cautious if you verify at any place using twitter because you don’t want to mess with your social credit.
Gotchas to watch out for
It needs to be debated if it would be wise for a single private party to wield such power. Would your twitter identity become more important than your local identity?
Some interesting ideas I think twitter would / should do
More control on tweet embedding: Let me generate a id that any media agency that wants to embed my tweet needs. I can then charge for my tweets
Transfer tweet ownership: Currently if your tweet becomes popular, people reach out to you to add their product / business as a reply. This helps people make some money. It would be interesting to see if I could just pass on the tweet ownership to someone else and they would be free to add any reply to the main thread
NFT: While some startups are attempting this. Every tweet could be an NFT and that can drive the tweet embedding and ownership ideas as well.
Tweet Ads: Every time a tweet is embedded on an external site, twitter could show and ad and share revenue with the tweeter directly
Mail client: While twitter knows about the social capital, it still is hindered by the spam rules of other mail client providers. I suspect they may start their own
Influencer Management / Tracking / smart contracts: Imagine you hire an influencer for reaching X million audience. The entire deal is done on twitter where twitter is responsible for measurement of success (which they already do). As soon as the success criteria is met, the influencer is paid . This operation could be controlled via ethereum smart contracts. This makes the entire system seamless and painless
You may have noticed I did not talk about tweet edits.
Read why I don’t think twitter would ever, or should ever allow tweet edits
Also read
The Uselessness of Net Promoter Score:
While NPS(Net promoter score) maybe an extremely popular metric to understand customer loyalty, there is little evidence to support it’s claims.In this article I detail out everything from history of NPS, to uses, to issues