Should Twitter Start Worrying More About Its Brand?

I’ve been blissfully out of touch the last few days — except for occasionally reading The Boston Herald, so I missed the fact that Twitter was infiltrated last week by a worm. A worm named Mikeyy. In fact, the back and forth about the worm has been, so, well, back and forth, that, not being sure whether its attacks were over, I finally got around this morning to downloading Tweetdeck, a Twitter spin-off service used by a lot of the hard-core users I follow; the best bit of advice on how to combat Mikeyy was to use third-party clients like Tweetdeck, that, slug-like, feed off of Twitter but aren’t owned by it. For Twitter, the existence of these Twitter-like services has long been thought of as part of its considerable attraction. In fact, though I’m not sure how true this is anymore, a person who should know these things told me sometime in the last year that Twitter was actually counting on these third-party services to help it determine its business model.

I’d been told that Tweetdeck rocks, and it does. Tweetdeck makes the real Twitter look almost analog by comparison. It wasn’t until I started using it (see the screen grab above), that I realized how many Replies I’ve missed over the last few months since it gives them equal visual weight to random tweets. (The same applies to Direct Messages, but, hey, that’s personal!) TweetDeck is only the beginning — there are many other services as Twhirl, Twitterific and Twitter Grader (which ranks the influence of individuals on Twitter) and on and on, all of which feed off of the Twitter phenomenon. So that’s great … right?

Maybe not so great. In the case of Tweetdeck, I’ve just discovered something that I may start using more than Twitter itself. It’s that much better, and the benefits to Twitter, in that scenario, aren’t necessarily clear.

And then there’s the flip side: as my colleague David Weir posted the other day, the Twitter phenomenon has also given rise to services like Magpie, which bills itself as an “ad network for Twitter” and lets advertisers pay people to tweet about their products. Such services may be hard to entirely police, but the existence of this type of advertising scheme opens the floodgates of Twitter to spammers, diminishing the value of the core Twitter service. While those of us who are deep into social media may know better, many users will assume this is somehow authorized by Twitter, and again, Twitter suffers.

Twitter couldn’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t even think of trying to shut down any of these attempts to out-Twitter Twitter, but as its legend grows, it needs to clearly define where its brand ends, and those who spin off of it begin.