The dilemma that Twitter has given new startups

venturebeat.com

13 points·thankuz··2 comments

If done consciously, with one's own capital or openly disclosed to investors, this is a risky strategy, but appeals to some: one will want to exit the trade before the rare event happens. This occurs for instance in a speculative bubble, where one purchases an asset in the expectation that it will likely go up, but may plummet, and hopes to sell the asset before the bubble bursts. This has also been referred to as "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taleb_distribution#Risky_strate...

I agree with you, building around someone else idea is risky as you may end up competing with the api owner. However there is so much advantage to it. Building a service around twitter make you confident in having an established user base that mzy adopt your product. it is all about weigth the risk/advantages.

To talk about twitter in particular, i think twitter is the worst developer friendly API provider i've found so far.

Our product is all about building a service around twitter, and the product can't be built without access to their Beta site API. We've quested an access to the API so much time since at least 2 months and we haven't get even an email explainning why we can't have access to it and providing us with some insigth about the tie we'll be able to access it. Can one work for months on a product without being sure he will be able to release it? As a result we are thinking about leaving twitter as a host platform even thught it is the best one for our products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com