I don't understand why people think it's fair to criticize a move like this without offering a plausible alternative that will sustain the business. Sure, letting other people build on it got them to where they are today, but where exactly is that? With massive infrastructure and engineering costs, but little income.
Twitter doesn't owe anybody anything. We owe them. If they don't find a way to monetize, then everyone loses.
Perhaps this is inevitable. A necessary step for Twitter to stay alive. But then maybe instead we should be asking ourselves what's next? What's after Twitter? Twitter (et al.) have proven how valuable this kind of service is, but also that it can't be sustained as a business, at least not without some pretty ugly changes.
App.net is a start, but I think it gets it wrong. The value in Twitter is that anyone can use it, anywhere, for the cost of getting online. If we boil it down to just being a highly-scaled service layer with a standard API, maybe the it's the developers themselves that should be paying for API access. Let the 3rd party app ecosystem thrive, but make them pay for what they use. Right now Twitter's doing the opposite and might end up dying slowly over many years as a result.
The problem with Twitter is that they took way, way too much investment money. Now that we know what Twitter looks like, you could build it from scratch for much less. If Twitter dies because it's impossible to sustain the valuation their investors were hoping for, perhaps someone would build a less ambitious alternative.
Even though the magnitude is bigger, it could be similar to the Digg-Reddit saga. Digg was hyped as the next big thing, took too much money, made extremely risky moves and collapsed. and then collapsed. In the meantime, Reddit slowly built a less ambitious product that eventually replaced it.
Morg: I can't reply to you directly, but it looks like you've been hellbanned. Might want to chuck a quick email pg's way and see if you can't get it sorted out.
In both cases they were easier to use solutions to social communications on the Internet. But these profit-seeking corporations are now standing in the way of futher progress. The gatekeepers need to go. A new decentalized protocol to replace both of them desperately needs to developed.
IRC still has a huge foothold in dev/geek communities. Email is something I use every single day for communication and business. Maybe there's more you'd like to explain but if I'm to just taking this at face value, I have to say you're horribly wrong.
Right, and my point is that if they don't want people to mess with their product then its entirely their right to prevent it. While it may not be smart, it's a different situation than email/IRC.
I found the way Twitter works very similar to IRC. #hashtags, DM's and @references are all from IRC. Twitter made a system like this easier to use, and centralized it one big system rather than loosely connected chat networks.
In a similar manner Facebook replaced email with a centralized system which again is easier for users but has the same gatekeeper issues.
Although I disagree with how twitter is handling things, I believe this is twitter getting their shit together as they get ready to roll out ads via their API. Third party apps will display sponsored tweets very soon.
Twitter doesn't owe anybody anything. We owe them. If they don't find a way to monetize, then everyone loses.