
Here’s Why Developers Are Scaring Twitter - bjonathan
http://gigaom.com/2011/03/15/heres-why-developers-are-scaring-twitter/
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zacharycohn
The last line of the article was good: "If [Twitter] really had 90 percent of
all tweet traffic, it wouldn’t need to lay down the law. The market would have
spoken already."

This is along the lines of what I was wondering about when they made their
announcement: Why are they so concerned about 10% of users?

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rick888
This is why I will never base my entire business on twitter. I wrote a stats
app 2 years ago, but I never released it.

There's nothing stopping Twitter from using you as a test while you build your
business up and then directly compete with you by adding in any features that
they know are popular.

I suppose it might work for a short-term pay day, but I would be trying to
diversify asap if I were any of the current businesses based on it.

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Stormbringer
If you put the effort in, you should have released it. Because hey, money.

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rick888
You're right. I have a history of personal projects that I've started and
never finished. I think the problem is that since I had a day job during that
time, it was easy for me to lose focus. I've since quit my day job and I've
been working full-time on my new projects (not related to twitter, but I did
gain some good experience and reusable libraries with that project).

It's one of the problem you face if you have a startup and a day job. At least
when I would get home from my job, it was very difficult to switch gears to my
own projects..and my code ended up unfocused and scattered.

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rudiger
I'd be more interested to see "Here's Why Developers Are _Scaling_ Twitter".

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rokhayakebe
Let us put ourselves in a Twitter executive shoes for a second. Here we are
worried about monetization because, well, it is not an issue we can keep
deferring. Now while we are wrestling with trials and errors, we see other
companies like Adly racking in $50,000 from one tweet. What do you do? You
shut down all the opportunities for new comers to milk your cow when all it is
doing for you is eat and poop.

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Stormbringer
To extend your metaphor, yes, the Twitter executives probably feel like that.
However, it is not the fault of the third party developers that Twitter can't
be arsed even to get it's own bucket and take a turn milking the cow.

Moreover, in that metaphor, a lot of the third party devs have been bringing
grass and other tasty treats for the cow, looking after it better than the
Twitter execs, who would have been happy just to let the cow wander around
uncared for until it fell in a ditch somewhere.

At the end of the day, yes, it is their cow, but they are acting extremely
ungratefully to the people who helped them build and popularise their
platform.

