TwitPic Founder's Heello Launches As A Simple Twitter Clone
Last August, we reported that Noah Everett, the founder of Twitter photo sharing site Twitpic, has launched a new site, called Heello. The site wasn't open to the public yet, but a year later, it looks like the curtains have finally been drawn on Heello.
Context & Ripple Effects
Heello opens to the public almost exactly a year after Noah Everett first teased it, and the timing is pointed: in May 2011 Twitter began rolling out its own photo-sharing service, converting TwitPic's core function into a native feature and putting Everett's main business on the defensive inside an ecosystem he helped build.
The launch also coincides with Twitter consolidating control of its own surface — Jack Dorsey's July 2011 product-side cuts, new sales-and-marketing executives for the monetization push, New Twitter upgrades, and Realtime Activity Streams that move beyond the reverse-chronological stream. A platform tightening its grip is precisely when its best-known third-party builder ships a direct competitor.
First-order effects
- Everett is now on both sides of the platform line: Heello competes with Twitter for users' attention while TwitPic still depends on Twitter's firehose and audience for distribution.
- Twitter's first-party photo hosting already undercuts TwitPic's reason to exist as a standalone site, so Heello doubles as a hedge for Everett's franchise rather than a pure vanity project.
Second-order effects
- Other developers building on Twitter's API get a fresh cautionary data point — the May 2011 photo move showed a popular third-party category can be nativized without warning — raising the perceived risk premium on single-platform bets.
- A credible clone pressures Twitter to keep shipping visible product improvements to justify staying on the official client rather than drifting to alternatives.
Third-order effects
- If platforms keep absorbing their ecosystem's most successful features, the developer layer around them reorganizes around either multi-platform products or niches the platform owner has no incentive to clone — a structural test of how much independent software can survive on top of a closed social graph.
The trend: Social platforms are increasingly nativizing their third-party ecosystems' winning features, pushing those developers to hedge with rival products or multi-platform strategies.