
Twitter's Abuse Of Its Outside Developers Is Its Downfall - mikecane
http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/this-is-what-twitter-does-not-want-to-happen-part-four/
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cletus
I don't buy this at all. In fact, I don't buy the conventional wisdom that
developers are what makes and breaks a platform. Developers do what Deep
Throat suggests: they follow the money.

People often complain about the unpredictability and capriciousness of Apple's
App Store policies yet it's still where developers flock to. Why? Because they
make money. Those same policies arguably hurt developers but they definitely
help the consumer, which ultimately does help the developer. Tae that as an
example of developers not knowing what's good for them.

You see the same thing particularly in tech journalism: people often say the
problem with, for example, Windows Phone 7 or WebOS is a lack of developers.
No. The problem is a lack of users (and thus money to be made). Developers
follow the money.

In the case of Twitter, I think it's downfall is that it is simply a very
marginal product and has missed its opportunity to change that. Its usage is a
lot lower than the number of accounts suggests [1]. I believe it was
envisioned as a way of people sharing status updates in a more public fashion
than Facebook. The reality of Twitter (IMHO) is that it's a way of following
celebrities.

Twitter clients were doomed before they started, doomed to commoditization
then cannibilzation that is. It was naive to go into building on someone
else's platform any other way (yet many did seem to believe that Twitter was
somehow "different").

I don't believe the existence of these apps is the reason for Twitter's
success either. My personal opinion is that people decide to use Twitter and
then look for an app to do it. Twitter lives and dies by the success of...
Twitter.

[1]: [http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-how-many-
use...](http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-how-many-users-does-
twitter-really-have-2011-3)

~~~
swombat
I agree. I'd argue that twitter's success made the developers, not the other
way around. Certainly, the departure of developers is not going to unmake
Twitter, not least because they have the resources to build their own clients
now. If I were a TweetDeck user and TweetDeck vanished, I wouldn't stop using
twitter, I'd just switch to a new client (as I have many times)...

~~~
code_duck
Switch to a new client, as you have many times... but the developers don't
matter?

Try having one official mobile client and a web client. And if you don't like
either one, you're out of luck - and then the service is out of luck when you
stop using it in favor of one with better software.

The relationship between developers and service providers is ideally
symbiotic.

------
code_duck
It's certainly reduced my goodwill towards the company and platform, both as a
developer and a consumer. I won't use the Twitter API. Same goes for Etsy - if
you check out the mailing list, as small as it is there's some serious
discontent there. No coincidence some of the same people are involved in those
two companies.

Twitter, Fred Wilson et al. appear to have made a calculation that keeping
developers on their good side was not as important as their other plans. I
don't think a wealth of Google+ apps is going to make or break the service,
but it doesn't hurt. I'd certainly consider writing apps based on G+. I can
picture the API being a lot more stable and professionally managed than
Facebook's API, too.

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StrawberryFrog
"The same thing could happen with Google+. An app could come along that would
bring sense to its UI/UX"

I'm not sure what this means. Google+ launched with an Android app that, to me
anyway, has strong functionality, carries the same design as the website, and
like the website, makes sense.

Is the author saying that:

1) They don't like the Google+ UI/UX and want a different design that would in
their opinion "bring sense to it". This would be a small minority opinion,
judging by the favourable reviews.

2) They pay no attention to android apps, and so haven't seen this app. Is it
on iPhone?

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jccodez
It will be interesting to see what developers create from the g+ apis. I will
be taking a look at integrating when they are released.

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jgroome
So Google may release G+ APIs, and every developer is going to drop Twitter
for G+? Come on. Even if they did, who's to say Google won't pull the exact
same stunt and leave developers in the cold?

Come to think of it, don't you think the importance of external developers in
the Twitter ecosphere is ever so slightly overstated?

~~~
ohashi
If I were a gambling man, and I am, I'd bet on Google being better to their
devs than Twitter. Why? Past performance. They are a much larger community
that has a LOT of goodwill in the developer community. Considering 90+% of
their income is still ads, why would they throw that down the drain for
something that barely affects their bottom line?

~~~
niklasl
I have to quibble with Google having a lot of goodwill to burn. They withdrew
any kind of usable search API a long time ago, considering Google's
preeminence in search that is rather insular and not helpful for finding novel
ways to build on search. They provided a translation API only to decide that
it was too popular and pulling the rug out from under a lot of people who has
built stuff on it.

~~~
msie
A million upvotes for this. They'll punish people for trying to use their
search results yet they scrape other websites and reformat their content for
display in those search results! Bing and Yahoo have search APIs whereas they
don't have them anymore. So goodwill is not guaranteed.

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nir
For a long time Twitter apps were developed simply to enjoy the Twitter hype
rather than any financial gain. For some reason Mainstream media adopted
Twitter as the invention of the century, so developing a unique Twitter app
was a way to get linked to from some gushing NYT article.

Now that Twitter is less of a novelty, and the chances of making any money off
it are not impressive, it's not such an attractive prospect, regardless of
Twitter's own actions.

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gsiener
Upvoted because finally someone used the possessive its properly.

