Day of reckoning: Twitter wants to kill the ecosystem around your favorite third-party apps
A couple of hours ago, the company's Michael Sippey writing a blog post about the company's API which wants to discourage certain types of apps from growing. What types of apps, you ask? Basically, anything described in the upper-right quadrant of this graphic. What types of apps are those? Well …
In the upper right-hand quadrant are services that enable users to interact with Tweets, like the Tweet curation service Storify or the Tweet discovery site Favstar.fm.
That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, "traditional" Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience." And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.
As we pointed out recently, the Twitter alternative App.Net came to being out of reaction to some decisions Twitter was making about the company's ecosystem. By actively discouraging development of these kinds of apps — stuff that front-facing consumers use — and enforcing limits on the size of developer apps (100,000 users or, if you're already huge, 200 percent of your current userbase) Twitter may force the hand of certain developers to leave the service. Now, to be clear, Twitter can allow some of these apps to further expand, but based on this document, they may just say no. So to put it simply, if truly innovative things like Storify can't grow in this model anymore, Twitter encourages them to leave. This is an incredibly poorly-considered decision and will cost them in the long term as a platform.