On Sun, 13 Feb 2011 14:16:30 -0500, Adam Green <[email protected]>
wrote:
Edward, I'm going to jump in on the partner issue, since that is my
big point. I think you are thinking too small when you say " If you
want to be a "partner" with Twitter, *you* are the one who needs to
have something to offer *them* IMHO." One dev is very small compared
to Twitter. 10,000 devs is a labor force. 100,000 devs is a market
that protects Twitter from *any* competitor, including Google. We are
all partners, because we all make money. You look old enough to
remember dBASE. That was a huge labor force that protected
Ashton-Tate
for years when they had a product with technical limitations. Sound
familiar? Corporations and government agencies used dBASE not because
it was *best*, but because they could find many qualified developers.
Ashton-Tate started attacking their developers in 1988, when they
were
one of the top 5 software companies. They were out of business 3
years
later.
If Twitter wants to be embedded into the infrastructure of
corporations around the world, they must have outside developers. If
they want it to be a cool toy for the Kardashians and Justin Beiber
to
amuse their fans. They don't need us at all. It is their choice.
Well, I'm old enough but I was doing something radically different from
Ashton-Tate at the time. This whole thread is starting to sound eerily
similar to last year, when Fred Wilson made the infamous "filling holes"
blog post, followed by Twitter buying Tweetie, followed by Chirp. I'd be
surprised if the *Twitter* ecosystem could support 10,000 independent
developers - they'd self-organize into businesses with some sort of
power law size distribution, where the largest such business is Twitter
itself.
I don't know that Twitter "wants to be embedded into the infrastructure
of corporations." It seems to me that Twitter is unique and not at all
suited to intra-enterprise communications. Besides, there are dozens of
enterprise software platforms that can do everything Twitter can do
except talk to the hundreds of millions of Twitter users in real-time.
;-)
Maybe I am thinking too small, but then again, people aren't coming to
*me* with problems big enough to require whitelisting, or for that
matter Cassandra, or MapReduce, or sending thousands of DMs a day. Even
if they did, there's no way I could compete with Twitter. I really
should save this for my blog - it's been a while since I wrote a post
about Twitter, and that's what my search analytics tell me people read
there. ;-)
--
http://twitter.com/znmeb http://borasky-research.net
"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." -- Paul
Erdős
--
Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc
API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi
Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list
Change your membership to this group:
http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
