How Twitter Came to Boston
bostinno.com
bostinno.com
1) build a platform
2) get devs to use your platforms data
3) capriciously threaten to cut off access to drive a sale.
There's something basically malicious about building businesses like this. Companies used to pay for innovation, now they're able to simply choke it out.
The key in getting a big acquisition is multiple suitors. If you've only got one company chasing you, you are at their mercy. It's an unenviable position.
What it comes down to is this: if you want to develop software, you can build for the Web and/or Unix and/or OSS platforms; or alternatively, you can be a sharecropper.
If you manage to leverage that position... you are that much more dependent. And with the number of acquisitions and implosions of this nature that have happened over the last few years, there is no excuse not to see it coming early on.
I'm not suggesting Big Social (I just made that up!) is good or right, just that it's not horrid or evil (from an API access standpoint). It's operating exactly as you should expect an entity run by people to behave: In their own best interests. Is this ideal? No, not for the rest of us. But that's how it is, always has been, and always will be.
That anyone still considers this newsworthy is the only surprising part of it to me.
It's essentially a commodity product, with multiple competing implementations, open-source offerings across the board, and is something that can be built (I know this because it has been built -- repeatedly) on a scale of months.
If Twitter seriously paid $100M for that, I think whoever is leading up M&A might be completely disconnected from technological reality.