If you follow me on Twitter, you likely saw a lot of rage tweets aimed at Twitter over the past few days. I probably went a bit overboard in my frustration, but the future for 3rd party client apps is certainly not as upbeat as has been portrayed publicly. I wish I could share several of the backchannel conversations I’ve had over the past few days while rage tweeting. Suffice it to say, there are quite a few interesting people who agree with my dire take more than they would care to admit in public.
Given the overzealous nature of some of my tweets, I wont quote them all here, but I did want to record a few for posterity (since we really have no idea what will happen with our history of tweets). The other night Jack Dorsey, one of the founders and current Executive Chairman of Twitter tweeted this quote:
“We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public.” —Walt Disney
That riled me up a bit, but I think my response to him on Twitter was actually quite well reasoned:
I hope you aren’t taking inspiration from that quote in regard to Twitter policy changes. World of difference. You know it.
This isn’t about critics not liking new features or product changes, Twitter evaporated millions of dollars of value in the ecosystem.
So many great people have poured their lives and cash into building Twitter clients, which in turn helped build Twitter.
Ultimately, Twitter should care more about the public than critics, and even developers. But this was about money, not the public.
So the real question is whether sucking millions of dollars out of the ecosystem in hopes of billions for Twitter was justified.
But no matter how it turns out for Twitter, the real & perceived injustice of starving clients out of the ecosystem will haunt Twitter.
Tweets: 1 2 3 4 5 6
August 19, 2012