Twitter Spawned 50,000 Apps To Date, Will Open Up Firehose For More
Twitter's Director of Platform Ryan Sarver just took the stage at Le Web a couple of minutes ago, and shared some announcements with the audience about the future of the platform and the effect this will have on the ecosystem.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter had been adding platform building blocks in late 2009: OAuth for credential authorization, an opt-in Geolocation API, and Lists for organizing conversations. Opening broader access to the full stream turns those features from Twitter-controlled product additions into inputs for third-party services.
The move also arrives as Twitter says it expects to begin making money in 2010. A developer ecosystem of this scale gives the company distribution beyond Twitter.com while making platform access a consequential part of its business model.
First-order effects
- Developers gain a richer, more immediate data source for clients, analytics tools, and services built around Twitter activity.
- Twitter expands the value developers can create on top of its network while increasing the operational importance of managing access to its underlying stream.
Second-order effects
- Third-party Twitter applications will compete more on how they filter, organize, and act on the stream than on basic access to individual messages.
- Businesses seeking to reach Twitter users gain more potential intermediaries as developers combine stream access with Lists and opt-in location data.
Third-order effects
- If Twitter continues to widen data access while pursuing revenue, its platform rules become a central lever for allocating value between the network and the developers that extend it.
- The pattern points toward social networks functioning as programmable distribution infrastructure, where identity, data access, and developer terms shape the surrounding market.
The trend: Twitter is evolving from a destination product into a developer platform whose data access can seed a broader ecosystem of specialized services.