May The Tweets Be With You
The ecosystem growing around Twitter is something we very much believe in nourishing and supporting. There are lots of really awesome services and applications out there like TweetDeck, TweetMeme, Tweetie, BackTweets, Tweetboard, and others that we absolutely love as do many users.
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2009 Twitter has outgrown its Silicon Valley origins: traffic rankings put it past Bebo, LinkedIn, Digg and the New York Times, and its role in June's post-election upheaval in Iran made it a globally significant platform rather than a niche messaging toy. That scale has attracted a dense layer of client and analytics services built on its open API — from Tweeterboard's influence rankings back in 2007 to Tweetree's richer take on Twitter.com itself late last year.
This post is Twitter's answer to a question those developers were starting to ask: does the platform intend to absorb or to nurture them? By publicly naming TweetDeck, Tweetie, TweetMeme, BackTweets and Tweetboard as services it 'absolutely loves,' the company is making an explicit commitment that the clients competing with twitter.com for user attention are assets, not threats.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers building on the API get a public green light from the platform owner —TweetDeck, Tweetie and their peers can keep investing against the assumption that Twitter will not cut off the interface layer they occupy.
Second-order effects
- A stated commitment to nourishing the ecosystem lowers the risk premium for new entrants and their backers, pulling more client, analytics and syndication startups onto the same API — which also means Twitter's own product roadmap increasingly has to be coordinated with, not just ahead of, its most popular third-party clients.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Twitter cements the classic platform bargain of this era: a thin core service owned by one company with the experience layer built by outsiders — leaving both sides exposed if the owner later decides the interface layer is worth reclaiming.
The trend: Rapidly scaling consumer platforms are learning to court — and depend on — third-party developer ecosystems built on open APIs, even where those ecosystems compete with the core product.