Twitter, which has been a very open system, will increasingly become one where the important interactions are controlled by the company.*

For-profit companies owning and developing communication platforms always comes at a price. They need openness to attract users, but need to enclose to capture scarce market value.

Ben Brooks describes recent going-ons at Twitter:

“It is very clear that Twitter dropped their old mentality with the approach they are taking towards third party developers — they are treating them with blatant disrespect and using a cloak of vagueness to hide it (albeit poorly). Respect

The first blow came with the not-so-subtle, shall we say, “encouragement” that developers should no longer make full-featured Twitter clients. OK, we get it you don’t want people partying on your lawn anymore.

Then came the outright crippling of the usability of all these apps under the cloak of “security” with the forced change from xAuth to OAuth for DMs.

Now we get the TweetDeck acquisition that lands another sucker punch to third party developers.

TweetDeck has a pretty large user base, all while being a pretty crappy Adobe Air app 2 that Twitter is more than talented enough to replicate. Yet instead of going out and making their own version of TweetDeck, they rewarded that developer with a large cash payout (oddly enough more than I bet the poor VCs get back from Twitter in the end).

Essentially this tells other developers that they now have two options:

1. Continue developing in a hostile environment with ever changing rules, for a company that doesn’t want you developing for it.
2. Get your user base big enough that Twitter will pay for you to stop developing your app.

Of course Twitter has said they will keep TweetDeck around — I for one am not holding my breath on that one. 3

The respectful thing to do would have been to say that they are ceasing to allow full API access in six months time — no exceptions, unless of course they buy you. That would at least show your community the respect it deserves and allow them the time to plan for transitions to the future. Instead Twitter have decided to leave developers wondering: “what’s next?”

It’s the equivalent to being invited somewhere and saying: “maybe I’ll stop by, maybe.” Answering so is just disrespectful to the host that is trying to plan things. While rejecting third party apps outright would be an outrage for developers and users, it would at least be honest. Million Directions, No Course

The craziest thing is that even though Twitter is very clearly focused on growth and money — they seem to be going a million different ways with it.

Add the quickbar with promoted trends in a highly popular client, remove it and apologize. Add cumbersome rules for other developers. Spend tons of money to buy an Adobe Air app.

Look at these three things and tell me what the strategy is? It looked like with the first one Twitter was going to try and monetize the service with paid ads and the like. Then they decided to put that to bed and start being cranky to the developer community, seemingly to push use back to their free (and ad free) apps. Then they blow a wad of cash on another app that is free and lacks ads.

So what Twitter now has done:

1. Annoyed users
2. Pissed off developers
3. Bought a free Adobe Air app

What they are still lacking: money.

They went from looking for more ways to inject advertising (the revenue model of choice for Twitter) to looking for ways to force users on to their platforms, that lack a revenue model.”