Did Twitter Buy Clutch.io To Build A Self-Service Platform For Advertisers?

I read the news last night that Twitter was buying mobile app service provider Clutch.io, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Clutch has two products that it offers app developers, Clutch A/B Testing and Clutch Framework. Although most of the people who wrote about this immediately focused on the ability to quickly test features of mobile apps, I thought, perhaps, that the Framework, with its hybrid approach that combines the performance and functionality benefits of native apps with the high-speed developement of HTML 5, might be the key.
After all, this is the kind of method that many popular social apps are now using, including Quora, LinkedIn and Facebook. Indeed, on a page on its site dedicated to the hybrid approach, Clutch shows a graph of what they call “The Hybrid System Sweet Spot,” that shows the much lauded Instagram app in the sweet spot between “100% native,” and “Multi-Platform” (in other words, HTML 5 code that is packaged for specific platforms). Twitter, notably, is all the way to the “native” right.
So maybe that’s it. Just like Facebook bought Instagram to show it how to engineer user experience using hybrid techniques, Twitter is now buying the intellectual property—and hiring the brains behind—Clutch.io in order to move their mobile apps in a more agile direction. And this may well be true.
But unlike Facebook, whose mobile apps had widely been considered a liability before the Instagram buy, Twitter’s core functionality aligns well with mobile right out of the box. As they begin to do more ambitious things with the inline and pop-out display of tweets with their new “cards,” they will be facing a lot of the same issues confronting Facebook. And, at least to start, the special display options are reserved for paying advertisers and large publishers.
This is when the other shoe dropped for me. I have not used Clutch’s A/B testing platform, but it is similar to one of my favorite software-as-a-service apps, Unbounce, which makes it really fast and easy to build and test landing pages for marketing campaigns. What’s great about these kind of services is that, to a large extent, they are self-service. The interface is intuitive enough for non-technical people to deal with, but give designers and developers access to the underlying code to set things up any way a client wants.
As Twitter moves forward in its attempts to monetize, the “app-ification” of these “cards,” much like Facebook’s “tabs,” is where the action will be for advertisers. If Twitter can rapidly iterate (using, for instance, a hybrid approach) through templated (though customizable) options that advertisers can build themselves on Twitter’s own platform, they have a good chance of becoming a marketing powerhouse, and one that might be more nimble than Facebook.
Putting aside, for a moment, Dalton Caldwell’s criticism of Twitter and accepting that it is an advertising-driven platform, how it integrates marketing content is of critical importance. Twitter is not so much content as a distillate of content. Although some aphoristic tweets stand on their own, most exist in the context of a series or conversation. And the majority of tweets, at least in my feed, contain links to other content. So the act of reading tweets (“reeting”?) involves decoding and unpacking. The “cards” make the unpacking quicker, as you can see some representation of the content before you click on it. The browser experience within Twitter is its weakness at this point, not because of design, but because of the performance lag you may get when opening a link from a tweet.
Twitter is vulnerable on this front to Flipboard and other “reader” apps that do the unpacking for you and present your feeds (of all kinds) in a quickly browsable, visual manner that we used to consider “magazine-like.”
Because Twitter users are used to a quicker experience than Facebook users, it remains to be seen how much can happen in a “card” before the user will get turned off and decide that advertising is dominating the platform. This has to do both with how appropriately marketing messages are served and how demanding and/or entertaining the action or attention required. This is where A/B testing and quick iteration will really come in handy. For Twitter to be able to keep the navigational container of its mobile apps native and fast, but to have instantly updatable HTML 5 modules and JavaScript libraries embedded within, is a great model for a platform that can test and deploy these elements with a minimal disruption to users. If I had to guess, I would say that is where this current purchase fits in.
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