Twitter Stomps on 3rd Party Tool Community (Was it inevitable?)
This week it was revealed that Twitter was going to release its own url shortener. This news comes on the back of Twitter acquiring the iPhone Twitter app Tweetie (along with the company behind it). These two stories together represent Twitter essentially turning its back on the 3rd party tool community that has helped turn Twitter in to the success it is today. After all, can you imagine Twitter without mobile apps and Tweetdeck?
But was this inevitable? Should we all have been so foolish to think this was not going to happen.
I guess it depends on how you look at it. I am sure the owners of Atebits (the maker of Tweetie) have no hard feelings about it - since they are benefiting (to the tune of $ millions).
Twitter in essence made a brilliant business play. They developed a cool new micro-blogging platform and quickly released an extensive API that allowed a myriad of 3rd party developers to create a virtual industry around creating apps that interact with Twitter. Then they just sit back and wait. The community voted with their usage of the best and most wanted apps - and then Twitter can either acquire them, or build it themselves.
From a business perspective this is brilliant, from a 3rd party app developer standpoint - it sucks. There is no way around it. Hundreds of us spent many months, some years, developing software that Twitter can (and did) render irrelevant in a day.
We knew this was coming. So why did I push forward with the development of br.st?
1. Business is a risk, and developing 3rd party tools is always an even bigger risk due to its dependence on the main party's software/business. Getting out of bed in the morning is a risk. You have to take risks.
2. No one knew what direction Twitter was going to go. If they would have taken a different direction it could have benefited us.
3. There was always that possibility they could have chosen br.st to purchase or another company could have purchased br.st.
4. In the still unproven world of social media, it is anyone's guess what business software strategy will work. For example, did anyone think that Facebook would unseat the once king of the hill MySpace.
5. We could afford to take the risk. Brinkster (the parent company), is a long established solid company that could afford to take the risk of spending several months trying its hand at social media.
I feel bad for all the companies and people that based their entire existence around Twitter. My best advice is to try again, keep taking risks. Your idea could be the next Farmville app for Facebook (60+ million) users or it could go the way of Friendster.
In the end we have focused back on our core compitencies and learned several lessons. And we will keep moving forward...
- Jared (Follow me on Twitter - @JaredStauffer)