In an earlier post I posited that the folks behind Twitter were about building a short-messaging platform that went far beyond the prosaic visage they masquerade behind.

With the recent announcement of Twitter securing venture funding there was much discussion of Twitter being unfettered by a business plan. Apologies to anyone who actually knows this to be true however for now I will remain skeptical that this remotely true. I think it would too difficult to attract the engineering talent required to get something like Twitter off the ground if the sole stated aim was to attract users and see what happened next.

Business plans are over-rated?

The VCs involved quipped about investing in a company without a business plan had worked out previously for them and felt it would again. Andrew Parker believes that companies are busy working on traction because business plans are pointless until you get some. In a similar vein Umair Haque and Paul Kredosky also reinforce this meme and believe that companies might avoid a business plan to make themselves a small target when under the scrutiny of a VC. You can’t criticize what doesn’t exist is the thinking, I guess. This strategy seems a little too transparent to me, to be effective. Actually I think I will nickname this strategy ‘the Aardvark’ (in case it catches on!) - where companies roll up into a ball so VCs can only see the protective plate-armor; their millions of users who are waiting to spend their money as soon as the company thinks of something they can spend it on.

Alright, smart-alec, where’s the evidence that there is more to Twitter?

Twitter’s innocuous ‘What are you doing now?’ query, the broadcasting of which is the key function of the service currently, offers an activity which is novel enough to generate interest in the service but is also disarming enough for people to underestimate their strategy.

Dave Winer who loves thinking publicly about these things believes that Twitter’s democratic approach to its API is part of its strength. 

Twitter’s API is very simple. It covers the entire functionality, leaves nothing out. You could implement the Twitter user interface using the API.

The openness of the Twitter API differs from many other offerings which limit functionality available via API to keep users loyal to the main interface of the respective service.

Often people cite the simplicity of things as being their strength but what I think they mean is the level of abstraction and the constraints applied. A clean abstraction is economical in its language, avoiding permutative options - those can be achieved through combining with other abstractions.

The API has been kept abstract and open because Twitter are betting on people finding applications for a short-message nexus which can find you whilst mobile, working or at home. Designing the API like this may have been a natural tendency of the engineers in charge however when viewed alongside the extensive IM and SMS gateways they are maintaining worldwide there appears to be too much shape for a company supposedly looking purely for traction.

Stumble it!