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.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter has spent early 2010 buying some of the apps built on its own API while changes to the platform effectively killed off others, and the developer community that made the service useful is openly nervous about it — tension sharp enough that [[a:|the New York Times ran a story on rising friction between Twitter and outside developers]] alongside the company's own outreach.
With its Chirp developer conference approaching, API lead Ryan Sarver posted directly to the developer Google group to calm fears, an unusually public act of reassurance that syndication across outlets like MediaMemo and Both Sides of the Table suggests the industry is watching closely.
First-order effects
- Developers building Twitter clients now know the platform owner will compete with them directly — and may simply acquire or obsolete their product — so Sarver's message becomes the test of whether trust survives ahead of Chirp.
- The acquired apps' founders get a payout path while remaining independent client makers face an unclear rulebook for what Twitter considers fair game.
Second-order effects
- Investor and builder attention shifts away from thin Twitter clients toward capabilities Twitter has not yet claimed, since the acquisition-and-wipeout pattern reprices the risk of building on someone else's firehose.
- Rival platforms courting third-party developers gain an argument by contrast: Twitter's handling of its ecosystem becomes the case study others cite when recruiting builders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform companies converge on treating their APIs as strategic assets to be tightened rather than open grounds for an ecosystem, forcing developers to price platform risk into every decision about where to build.
The trend: Platform owners are moving from cultivating developer ecosystems to asserting control over them, with each reassurance-or-crackdown cycle resetting what builders can rely on.