Careful, Twitter — remember what happened to MySpace and Digg
remember what happened to MySpace and Digg — Twitter sent some shock waves through the technology community with a blog post on Friday that talked about its plans for the future, and suggested that those plans don't necessarily involve third-party services and apps.
Context & Ripple Effects
The warning lands on an arc GigaOM itself has been tracking since early 2011, when it argued Twitter should think twice about bulldozing the developer ecosystem that built its client base. The MySpace comparison has history behind it: back in 2009 Twitter was the riser passing Bebo and LinkedIn while MySpace headed south, and Royal Pingdom flagged Twitter as Digg's biggest threat as far back as January 2010.
What changed this week is that Twitter said it out loud: a Friday blog post confirming plans for a 'consistent user experience' built on expanded Tweets and Twitter Cards, which may not leave room for third-party services and apps. The story travelled widely — AllThingsD framed it as 'Twitter Cuts Off LinkedIn — Who's Next?', with pickups at The Verge, The Next Web, PC Magazine and others.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers whose products sit between users and Twitter's timeline face an explicit signal that their category may not survive the roadmap, forcing build-on-Twitter bets to be re-evaluated immediately.
- Twitter gains direct control of where ads appear: with promoted tweets rolling out first to Latin America and western Europe en route to 50 countries by year-end, a consistent native experience is also an ad-inventory play.
Second-order effects
- Developers burned by the policy shift have somewhere else to go — Digg's Newswire experiment shows social-news rivals actively courting displaced attention, echoing the 2010 warning that Twitter's own growth strategy threatened Digg.
- Rival platforms can now market themselves as ecosystem-friendly by contrast; every client developer Twitter alienates becomes a potential recruit for any network willing to guarantee API stability.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer platforms follow a lifecycle in which open APIs are a growth subsidy in the early years and a cost centre after scale — meaning 'build on our platform' carries structural risk regardless of the platform's current posture.
- The MySpace and Digg precedents suggest user loyalty follows the experience, not the brand: a network that degrades its surrounding ecosystem hands successors the same opening Twitter used against MySpace in 2009.
The trend: Consumer social platforms are converging on a playbook of closing off third-party access once they reach scale and need to monetize the experience directly — with Twitter's 2012 pivot the clearest test of whether ecosystem loyalty survives the clampdown.