Twitter follows Facebook down the walled garden path

theverge.com

13 pointsquarterto3 comments

This is the current consensus among the best performing tech companies. Close off your ecosystem and own you content end to end. That is the best way to monetize.

Not saying I agree, just saying that is the emerging zeitgeist.

Did you read the "What Twitter could have been" Dalton Caldwell blog post¹ last week?

¹ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4185757

Yes, but I disagree. I think it is actually better positioned than Facebook to build a big business. Twitter can advertise against breaking news, sports, celebs - a ton of eyeballs. And they don't have the obstacles around privacy and personal data that FB does.

That being said, I think they are making a myopic decision by shutting out their third party clients. A ton of innovation has come from those developers and they could easily find ways to integrate them into their advertising plans.

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