Back in September, I predicted that Twitter would acquire oneforty.com, "the Twitter Store of Apps," where one could shop to his or her heart’s content for any app under the Twitter sun. Not only did that prediction come to past, but today, oneforty is juggling the launch of its Premium Twitter App marketplace with a $1.85 million dollar round of funding.
Laura FittonDeveloped by author Laura Fitton from the Twitter for Dummies‘ fame and in conjunction with Pivotal Labs, the oneforty premium marketplace currently has 117 apps available for purchase out of 2300 apps in total.Those participating include Socialtoo and Twilk and 3rd-party developers can sell their apps on multiple sites if they so choose.
Developers must sell at a minimum price of $0.99 (see Twilk example below) and oneforty charges 25% commission off of each sale.
Socialtoo priced at $20 provides tools such as auto-following, auto-unfollowing,
auto-messaging those that follow you, along with daily stats
surrounding new follows and unfollows during a day.
Apps that are sold above $14.50 will have their commission fees dropped to 20% . The payments system is powered by PayPal and Oneforty collects affiliate fees (5%) from apps listed at the iPhone app store.
According to a Techcrunch report, oneforty will only support one-time purchases, with no subscription-option. But they hint that in the future, monthly fees might be considered. For the free apps, oneforty will continue to allows developers to accept donations on their Oneforty pages even if they don’t participate in the e-commerce platform.
The one app that jumped off the page at me was the Twitter Location (GeoLocation) App.
With a pricey licensing fee of $40, Twitter Location is powered by Yahoo maps and is a marketing tool to determine where one’s followers are originating from by country and region.
This is presently the only "location-based" app available for sale at oneforty. Why would this be the case when geolocation is such a hot button this year with a good number of location-based social networks launched and a dozen or more on their way.
The reason Twitter doesn’t have more location apps to sell just yet is simply based on lack of product. Coming fresh off of its major acquisition of Mixer Labs and it GeoAPI, the "location team" and their 3rd party developers are presently hard at work making location apps a reality. In my recent blog, titled, "Twitter & GeoAPI’s Great Land Rush Of 2010," I discuss the incubation process that is enticing developers to jump on board the geolocation bandwagon – in addition to the welcome mat that has been laid out for them to attend Twitter’s first-time-ever developers conference called "Chirp" sometime in the first quarter (date to be determined).
So as the Twitter ecosystem grows, keep a keen eye out for location apps to start appearing for sale at oneforty on or about midyear. The idea of a Twitter-specific marketplace makes a lot of sense, but without location-based apps its not going to be as current as it needs to be keep ahead of the ‘social’ curve. Similar to "real-time search" putting Twitter on the map in ’09 and entertaining some lucrative deals with Google and Bing, "geolocation" is going to be this year’s ‘must-have.’ So keep on the look-out…those apps are coming to a oneforty store near you!
