Is Twitter going to pull a bait-and-switch on developers? | Hacker News Reader

Is Twitter going to pull a bait-and-switch on developers?

econsultancy.com

22 pointsRyanMcGreal13 comments

Platform owners are the new land users and developers are share croppers.

If you develop for a platform, like Apple or Facebook or Twitter, you are basing your business on the whim of the platform owner.

Every change in development license for Facebook/Apple has killed off some company who got in their way.

Zynga is estimated to be worth $5 billion, but it is running on Facebook. At anytime, Facebook can kill Zynga or force it to pay a large tax to be on their platform. Otherwise, Zynga might have enough money to buy Facebook outright.

So the trick is to be a platform owner, instead of making one off applications.

Incidentally, if you own a website that is highly dependent on SEO, Google falls into a similar category as Apple, Facebook, or Twitter.

If your customer acquisition depends on one source and they control the relationship you have with your customer, you might be screwed. :)

How much is facebook worth?

One note on the Fred Wilson quote:

> Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.

Part of why the Twitter platform is so rich with services is that the company didn't insist on filling in all the holes itself. The more open model they followed is precisely what allowed such creativity in the services that run on top of the platform.

And haven't many people argued that Twitter did this exactly right? The idea being that they did one small and simple thing, provided a generous and open API and then let other people help bring interest to them?

To comment on that, Twitter has been promising a "version 2" of their API since around the time they went from 12 employees to 150 and took that $150M, and we haven't seen anything.

A glaring example of how little Twitter has done to support developers since their original API is this support ticket that has been open for about 15 months: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=214

Obviously, those 150 people have been working hard on something for the last year, and providing the best tools for developers (let alone filling huge holes in their API) doesn't seem to be the top priority.

I could be totally wrong on this and API V2 will be out in a few weeks and blow all of our socks off.

This seems like an extremely alarmist take on a VC's blog post. My read, which is also not authoritative, is that Wilson is just saying "stop writing URL shorteners and image uploaders".

More specifically, I think what he's saying is, "if you write a URL shortener or image uploader, don't whine when/if Twitter decides that it needs to compete against you by building that functionality into the product."

All of those people writing those things advertise Twitter. As we all know Twitter has a huge drop off rate where people post a few tweets and then go away... forever.

So Twitter is always in the need of new users. Let's say they do an Apple and kick out all of the various different add-ons that they make (while allowing ones that they don't make until they make one themselves).

Eventually Twitter will just be another memory because the critical mass, people advertising twitter, will fall away.

The least disruptive way for them to begin to capitalize on the money that 3rd party developers are making off of them, in my opinion, is to introduce an amazon type model, where the first 3000 (for example) api calls are free, and then they're charged at 0.01 cents per call or something. Just layer on a small api tax, so anybody actually making money can continue to do so, but those who aren't will go away and unload the system. Giving away some free api calls lets innovation and experimentation continue as well.

I suspect that "I think the time for filling the holes in the Twitter service has come and gone" should be read as "I won't invest in something like that anymore." He's a VC after all. My take is that he wants to see more interesting and compelling opportunities for his portfolio and believes they are built on top of the platform rather than augmenting it.

While that's certainly a reasonable interpretation of his comments, the enthusiastic chatter from Twitter employees in support of his comments speaks to this being a common view from within Twitter's ranks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com