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Comment by jgroome | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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?

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.

The translation API was marked as deprecated and will be phased out (along with them providing alternative APIs for you to transition to) because of abuse.

Making-up facts only weakens your argument.

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.

My argument is a bit more nuanced than that, I don't expect to drop Twitter for Google+ (unless Twitter forces the issue, of course). Instead, I expect something like the following

1. Google+ APIs are released.

2. Developers add Google+ support to their Twitter apps (the way some apps have Facebook support). Beyond directly improving their apps, developers may have some extra motivation to do this because of the state of Twitter's developer relationships.

3. Google+ support in Twitter apps will accelerate the movement of users / conversations (not developers) from Twitter to Google+ that mikecane has already documented.

4. I can't see a viable countermove that Twitter could make, so the bleeding from Twitter to Google+ will just get worse. Enough cuts like this one and the bleeding will get critical.

Post Google+ I'm still engaged with Twitter, but I've pretty much "jumped ship" from Facebook. One big reason why is that I love my Twitter client (Plume), but I haven't found a Facebook client I consider acceptable (let alone one I'm happy with).

I'll admit to being only one data point, but I think it speaks to the impact external developers can have.

Even if they did, who's to say Google won't pull the exact same stunt and leave developers in the cold?

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Because Google has a solid track record of dealing fairly with developers ... they've been giving devs access to their offerings via apis long before twitter was even a blip on the radar

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