Twitter Adds A New Feature, Another Blindside for Third Party Developers?
Twitter has just announced that it will begin sending email notifications to users when they're retweeted by someone they follow or when someone favorites one of their tweets. — Until now Twitter has given users …
Context & Ripple Effects
The email-notification rollout lands in the middle of a rapid platform retrenchment at Twitter: on May 8, 2011 it quietly discontinued RSS support, and on May 23 it confirmed the TweetDeck acquisition, reportedly in cash and stock, following weeks of rumors pegged at $40-50 million.
Each move pulls a function back inside Twitter's own walls — feed access first, now the leading third-party client, and now retweet and favorite alerts delivered straight to users' inboxes. ReadWriteWeb frames the notifications as potentially 'another blindside' for third-party developers, an unconfirmed framing but consistent with the week's pattern.
First-order effects
- Users no longer need a third-party alert service to learn they were retweeted or favorited — Twitter now ships that notification itself via email.
- Developers whose products centered on activity notifications see their core feature absorbed natively, days after losing RSS as a data-access route.
Second-order effects
- With TweetDeck confirmed as a Twitter acquisition, the company now owns the most prominent product built on its own API, pressuring remaining independent client developers to differentiate on features Twitter has not yet copied.
- Every future feature announcement now carries a credibility cost for the developer ecosystem: builders must weigh whether investing against Twitter's API is building on rented ground.
Third-order effects
- The sequence — RSS cut, client acquired, notifications nativized — points toward a platform asserting control over its access layer, where third parties survive only in gaps Twitter has not chosen to fill.
- If the pattern holds, ecosystem trust becomes a structural constraint on platform growth: each absorbed feature makes the next generation of developers less willing to build for the API at all.
The trend: Twitter is consolidating from open-platform utility into closed consumer product, absorbing third-party features and access routes one layer at a time.