Is all of Internet going to be locked? (Ref: Twitter)

I have never romanticized the past and since I am a future optimist, I believe the future is always better than the past. Sometimes there are pit stops and periods of reversals and right now we have another one of those.

The latest case in point is what Twitter did yesterday.

They locked Twitter only to the logged-in users.

So if you are not logged in, you can’t see Twitter data anymore.

• 😖 Search engines cannot crawl Twitter
• 😖 You cannot openly share Twitter posts (people won’t be able to see them if they are not logged in)
• 😖 All spiders that crawled Twitter data are dead

This affects your business negatively

As a marketer, you benefit most when information flows freely. When people discover your messages effortlessly you get the maximum reach possible.

That means tweets should be visible on Google and other search engines. They should be easily embeddable on blogs and even on other social networks. They should be shareable on Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.

What Twitter did killed your reach on all those platforms.

Now you will only be found by people who are logged in Twitter. The people outside of Twitter won’t discover you.

Twitter is not the only one. This is being done everywhere.

Years ago Twitter shut down their live data feed to Google. They have gone on and off since then, but this is radical. This has made Twitter a private network.

LinkedIn is already locked down. You can discover profiles easily but you cannot discover content and posts outside of LinkedIn.

Facebook is no different. It’s the same situation. Facebook’s content is not publicly accessible nor searchable. You have to be logged in.

Reddit and Quora, two highly content and search driven platforms haven’t locked down their content completely but they make it harder for content to be accessed by users not logged in. Removing the content either fully or partially when you try to access the sites.

This is increasingly the paradigm for the Internet. Not an ocean of information but just a collection of pools with walls constructed all around each one of them.

This is bad for your business

When content and reach is locked in this manner it’s bad for your business. You will have to create the same content many times over, worst still you will be forced to use paid promotions and spend on the platform to reach people.

Sure, bigger and well-capitalized businesses can handle that but this is not an ideal scenario for smaller businesses like yours or mine.

We benefit when the Internet is open and any content you create gets the maximum potential visibility and reach.

It’s killing Google

There was a time when Google was the real Index of the Internet. It indexed all the information on all sites, including publicly available information on all social media. Now it’s just a glorified Blog search engine.

Even content sites are putting their content behind paywalls and other disruptive access blockers.

Is there anything you can do?

We got on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms because they enabled business and communications. If that becomes limited then an alternative has to emerge. The movement will be towards content websites and open communities.

By all means set up your social profiles and build your audience but make sure you find a way to direct them to your own communities and communication systems. That’s the next step that business has to go.

Towards special interest communities that are open but managed and run on their own sites.

That’s the only way to ensure that your business is not overrun by an ego-drunk platform owner some years from now.