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Comment by Guildpact | Hacker News Reader

There is an article from wired that talks about it here http://www.wired.com/2014/10/twitter-fabric-sdk/

Getting your company ingrained into a larger part of the app market has huge benefits. Now if people aren't using the Twitter app, Twitter can track them and get data from them if they use an app that relies on Fabric.

The benefit is purely integrating themselves with larger and more diverse user bases.

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Huh. That article says basically what I said: "The payoff for Twitter will come if it can get developers to embrace MoPub, its advertising product, because it gets a cut of any ad revenue."

In which case, I'd be kinda skeptical. If the other tools are mainly loss-leaders for advertising, then Twitter will be prone to limiting or canceling them when the internal politics change.

Which is exactly what they did with API access previously: they cost money to operate and weren't for the moment seen as directly beneficial, so what was previously going to be free forever was suddenly cut back.

I agree. Personally I think it's a great tool, run by a wrong company. If some other company--say Google, Microsoft, or even Amazon--acquired this I would trust it 100 times more. This is not just because of their history of betraying their own developer ecosystem but more importantly because Twitter has never known (and still doesn't know) what they want to be (which in turn was the cause of aforementioned betrayal). All that fluff on the Wired article is just a fluff. Yeah sure you collect more data and sell it to advertisers to make more money, but tomorrow they may find out that the model doesn't work so well and may ditch it.

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