This is a perfect example related to my earlier post today.  I am a big fan of Pluggio and use it quite a bit. Pluggio is the easiest way I’ve found to find topics interesting to my followers and then tweet about them.

Without telling anyone, Twitter changed the rules of its API, thus rendering big chunks of Pluggio inoperative.

• Instead of addressing their capacity issues they change what they want and break everyone else.
• Instead of working with developers and giving them some notice of the change, everyone wakes up one morning to broken apps.

The culture will survive only if developers can see some stability and predictability.

Things are definitely changing at Twitter HQ:

• Twitter bought Tweetie and intends to rebrand it “Twitter for iPhone”
• Twitter investor Fred Wilson said the days of creating apps that fill holes in Twitter’s functionality are over.
• Twitter has announced that they are building their own link shortener

To me, this means that Twitter has made a strategic decision to move into the customer-facing facet (for lack of a better word) of the business. I think that’s a wrong move for two reasons.

There is Much Work to do on the Back End

I still get ‘Twitter is Overloaded’ messages several times a week. The various Twitter APIs are disjointed and in some cases incomplete. In my opinion, there is So Much work that needs to be done on the back-end to turn it into a robust industrial-strength platform. Wilson evangelizes about building great apps on top of the Twitter platform, but that platform needs to provide a level of reliability, availability, and robustness that just isn’t there yet. TIme and energy spent on the customer-facing side is time and energy that won’t get spent shoring up the back end.

Killing the Goose

Twitter owes its popularity to the hundreds of little developers that found a need and filled it.  Bit.ly, TwitPic, TweetDeck, etc all sprung up to fill holes in Twitter’s feature set.  It was applications like these that made Twitter actually useful for me.  Without them, I would have dismissed Twitter as an interesting toy.  Millions of people adopted Twitter because of the work of little developers. These recent strategic moves by Twitter will discourage the very activity that made it successful.

There is a second aspect to this: It’s not just the functionality provided by these developers, it’s the evangelism.  Hundreds (thousands?) of small developers hyped and promoted Twitter specifically because of they apps they developed.  By discouraging these developers, Twitter is encouraging them to move elsewhere and take their evangelism with them.