Snowcrashing

Remember Facebook Before Its Platform? Here Comes Oneforty For Twitter.

Posted on 24. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Trends

They say that personalization is coming to the 2010 web, in the form of filters and recommendations, to help user discover relevant data.

They also say that the vast majority of Twitter users are clueless. And Twitter’s efforts to engage and educate them through the Suggest User List (SUL) and the tiny ads of Twitter apps haven’t done much so far. TV celebs and the likes seem to only drag with them a few millions of rather inactive “viewers”….Neither could Twitter implement Facebook Connect to educate users through their Facebook tweetering friends…

Lastly, everybody knows  that third party applications, built through Twitter APIs, made it the $1billion success story that it is today, by spreading its usage in new and creative ways. But the only publicity that they get back from Twitter are tiny ads on the Twitter web site.

So here comes Laura Fitton, aka @pistachio, with oneforty.

Oneforty is  a social app store, where users can discover new apps and developers get to showcase their latest creations.

The discovery process can be done through charts of featured or popular apps, by categories or through lists generated by the site’s tagging system.  Each app has its own “Fan Page”, with links to download or rate it, the developer’s Twitter ID, user reviews, who else is using the apps, related tweets and press mentions. So a mix of filtered and social discovery in a neat and clean interface.

When you create your oneforty account, the site uses the Twitter API to generate your  profile. You can then customize it by “adding”  Twitter apps to it, and writing about who you are, your interests and who you like on Twitter.

On the other hand, developers are being encouraged to claim their apps so that they can have the ability to add information (e.g. screenshots and press mentions) to the apps’ profiles.

Oneforty’s revenue model is fairly basic. If you want to download a paid mobil app, oneforty provides a link to Apple’s App Store, allowing oneforty to collect an affiliate fee. But there’s a lot more potential to it.

Remember what Facebook was before its platform?  Remember it was still trailing  way behind MySpace? Twitter, for how big it seems today, is still in its infancy and shaped more as a platform than a community. Apps educate, engage, trigger the viral process. Laura Fitton’s oneforty could play a major role in this process, making Twitter closer to the mass market and helping developers improve the Twitter still harsh ecosystem.

I am not sure of how oneforty plans to promote itself. The most logical thing would be to see Twitter acquiring it, right away, or cloning it. We’ll see. The year of the App Stores has still 100 days before its end!

Tags: App Store, Trends