The inevitable showdown between Twitter and Twitter apps cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog. People usually think of business competition as occurring between substitutes – products that serve similar functions for the user. Famous substitutes include Coke and Pepsi, and Macs and PCs. In fact, especially in the technology sector, some of the most brutal competition has occurred between complements. Products are complements when they are more valuable because of the existence of one another – e.g. hotdogs and hotdog buns, PCs and operating systems. There is inherent tension between complements. Microsoft is famous for destroying companies that offer complementary products, either by bundling complementary apps with Windows (Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger, IE) or aggressively competing head-to-head against the most popular ones (Adobe, Intuit).
One of Google’s main complements is the web browser and desktop operating systems, which is why they built and open sourced the Chrome browser and OS. So what does all of this have to do with Twitter? Twitter API to Get Ads Inserted, Revenue to be Shared With Developers. The Twitter Platform's Inflection Point. I was emailing with a friend of mine yesterday who is a 30 year veteran of silicon valley. He'd written a post that was quite positive about the iPad. I sent him my post which wasn't so positive. We had a good discussion. Which ended with my friend making this point: iPad’s fate depends on entrepreneurs inventing new kinds of killer apps.
I got out of college in the early 80s when the desktop revolution was upon us. Contrast that with Lotus, another Cambridge company that built something entirely new on top of the desktop platform. Which brings me to the title of this post. Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. When you talk to a new user, they want to know how to post a photo to Twitter, they want to know "what is this bit.ly thing? " But those services don't feel like Lotus or Aldus to me.
When Facebook platform launched, we saw a massive number of new products and services launched on The Facebook. Twitter Officially Responds To Developers. Tries To Calm Fears. Full message at the bottom of this post. In Twitter’s development talk Google group, API lead Ryan Sarver took some time to try and calm developers fears regarding Twitter’s recent moves to acquire certain apps and effectively wipe out others. He explains the main motivation behind the acquisition of Tweetie was to remove the confusion that many new users would find when visiting the app store looking for “Twitter” and never finding what they were looking for because most apps aren’t called Twitter (that’s because Twitter won’t allow them to of course). Sarver also claims that this doesn’t mean the end for other iPhone Twitter clients.
There will apparently never be an “official’ twitter client – it was a mistake and “you won’t see that language used with Twitter clients in the future” he says. He concludes by assuring that Twitter is still very focused on building its platform and that is what Twitter’s upcoming developer conference Chirp will be about.
Our thoughts: Best, Ryan” Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study. Why Twitter Buying Tweetie is Great News. Before tonight there were probably 30 to 50 teams making a serious play to build the best mobile client for Twitter. Tonight one of those teams was annointed the official selection of Twitter itself and its leader at least is now a millionaire. People are saying that the acquisition of Tweetie by Twitter is bad news for the ecosystem of 3rd party developers that made Twitter so much more useful for millions of people.
In truth though, those odds were pretty good for all of them. Tonight's news demonstrates again that independent developers can code their way into cash, equity and a job at one of the hottest startups on the web. That bodes well for those of us who love to use the software built by all of them, too. Tweetie developer Loren Brichter is just 4 years out of college. Between cash and equity, Brichter must be a millionaire on paper at least. Tweetie offers an attractive and simple desktop Twitter client, but was most valued for its iPhone version. Leftover Takeout // Don't Get Mad, Get Smart. Twitter vs developers. The New Reality of the Twitter Ecosystem. In the last two months, a controversy has broken out between the startup of the moment, Twitter, and its ecosystem. Some of its actions — such as acquiring Tweetie (a mobile client that has since been rebranded as Twitter for the iPhone), coupled with its recent decision to impose limitations on companies building ad-related businesses on Twitter — have thrown everyone into a tizzy.
Dozens of tiny startups that formed specifically to leverage the Twitter platform are now wondering if they’ll be able to get anyone to fund their dreams. Chris Dixon, a New York-based angel investor and founder of VC fund Founder Collective, has been among the most outspoken about Twitter’s actions. “Twitter is like a drunk guy with an uzi killing partners left and right,” he recently tweeted. “Expect investment in ecosystem to drop significantly.” “A bunch of investors have told me recently there is no way they’d invest in Twitter ecosystem now,” he later added. Hot or Not? The House Always Wins.
The New Reality of the Twitter Ecosystem.