Why is Twitter Clamping Down on Developers?

16 Aug 2012

Guess tons of people are pissed off at Twitter’s developer related changes announced today (read more at Techmeme). While everyone is really right to do it, there are a few things that everyone is missing here.

First off, I am a developer and I hate what Twitter is doing. However, if I was in Twitter’s shoes, this totally makes sense.

If you remember Twitter bought out the most popular desktop client TweetDeck, the most popular iOS client; Tweetie and the most popular Twitter search engine Summize.

They did this all for a reason, they were doing better things with Twitter data than Twitter did. While they actually killed or ruined all those services is another question. They did it for a simple reason, get smart engineers who built great things and build them into twitter.

While that should not be a reason to kill developers right now. The problem Twitter as a business faces is that their only marketing value is the user generated tweets and nothing else.

If they allow other developers to build apps out of them and then market them and sell them, they are the one’s on the losing end.

Imagine this, you have a blog and you generate content out of it and then you have 1000 of other blogs just copy over your content and then place ads on them and make money out of it and you do not make a single penny out of it. That would definitely send you in a frenzy where you ask those 1000 blogs to only use some snippet of your article and send the users back to you.

This is the same spot Twitter is in. Other than tweets they have no other data unlike other social sites Facebook and LinkedIn*. What Twitter is doing is trying to make sure that they are protecting whatever little they have. After all the service is built around being simple.