{"id":332,"date":"2011-03-14T09:15:49","date_gmt":"2011-03-14T13:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/?p=332"},"modified":"2011-03-14T09:15:49","modified_gmt":"2011-03-14T13:15:49","slug":"twitters-ecosystem-woes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/twitters-ecosystem-woes\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter&#8217;s Ecosystem Woes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In case you missed it, Twitter recently <a href=\"http:\/\/groups.google.com\/group\/twitter-development-talk\/browse_thread\/thread\/c82cd59c7a87216a?pli=1\">updated their Terms of Service<\/a>, asking developers (effectively) not to build any more Twitter clients. \u00a0Now that they have their own apps, they don&#8217;t want developers to compete with them. \u00a0This announcement was followed, of course, by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techdirt.com\/articles\/20110313\/17021713476\/twitter-decides-to-kill-its-ecosystem-how-not-to-run-modern-company.shtml\">expected uproar<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The whole situation highlights several interesting issues.<\/p>\n<p>First, platform companies are always looking at emerging compliments for growth. \u00a0Ecosystems are great experimental &#8220;test tubes&#8221; for the platforms, and ecosystem developers always <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.payne.org\/2008\/06\/25\/gorilla-platform-apis-let-your-partners-figure-out-new-features\/\">run the risk of being subsumed<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>But this highlights a much deeper issue, unique to Twitter. \u00a0In spite of phenomenal\u00a0usage growth, Twitter&#8217;s still struggling with monetization. \u00a0The real problem is that they&#8217;re stuck in <em>utility-level value.<\/em> They&#8217;re much like AOL&#8217;s Instant Messenger: \u00a0widely used, but beyond display ads embedded in the Windows client, a very very tough app to make any money from.<\/p>\n<p>Given this, I&#8217;m not surprised to see them attempting to take more control &#8212; they don&#8217;t have any choice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In case you missed it, Twitter recently updated their Terms of Service, asking developers (effectively) not to build any more Twitter clients. \u00a0Now that they have their own apps, they don&#8217;t want developers to compete with them. \u00a0This announcement was &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/twitters-ecosystem-woes\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ramblings","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/payne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}