Comments on: Why does Twitter owe you API access?

By: mikepk

mikepk — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:28:28 +0000

Of course, that's the tradeoff. Twitter gives you access to their social graph, rabid engaged users, nearing mainstream market penetration, and accelerating growth. You either find a way to play their game, with their rules, or you leave it. Only you can decide if access to those traits is valuable enough to live with their restrictions as well as the uncertainty that they can shut you off at any moment. As others have said before, eventually a federated system will likely supplant Twitter, but we're a long way from there.

By: mikepk

mikepk — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:24:13 +0000

I think we have to agree to disagree then. Most of these third party applications require a social graph and enough active participation to make them useful. In essence, they're not really useful without Twitter as a foundation. You can argue that there are other services that are technically equivalent. Unfortunately, while they're technically equivalent, they do not have the critical mass that Twitter does. They don't command the same population of users or engagement. That's the power that Twitter has, they have the users and community.

The problem with monetizing the API access is that it requires a *lot* of work to do from Twitter's standpoint. They have limited resources (as all startups do) which means they have to pick and choose what they want to work on and try to utilize that effort to greatest effect, to get the most “bang for the buck”. It's not that they couldn't generate some money from the API, it's just that monetizing the API means commiting to service level guarantees, building out scalable architecture, reworking / rewriting their existing API, all while not disrupting their current growth pattern (and not allowing too much data to “leak out”, since their value is their community).

As a last point, it's also not the kind of business that's a “homerun”. VC backed firms are structured to go for the absolute biggest return possible, to be the one in ten ventures that generates the actual returns for a VC fund. I just don't see API monetization as in this class of business model.

By: mikepk

mikepk — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:28:28 +0000

By: mikepk

mikepk — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 07:24:13 +0000

By: jessestay

jessestay — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 04:47:35 +0000

Twitter doesn't owe us anything. However, we don't have to build or send users to Twitter if we can't build our business on the service. It's that simple.

By: Chris Charabaruk

Chris Charabaruk — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 04:47:07 +0000

I totally disagree with the idea that the third party services need Twitter more than Twitter needs them. There are a lot of competitors to Twitter now, and it probably wouldn't be too much work to retarget those third party apps to point at those competitors, instead. If Twitter alienates its ecosystem, its competitors would be glad to support them instead.

If this has something to do with monetization, though, why deny that fact to Jesse Stay, or any of the other developers building on Twitter's platform? Pretty much any reasoning suggested to Twitter seems to come back with a "nope, that's not why" answer. This isn't a game of 20 Questions, this is business. And when things happen in an irrational manner, business gets bad.

I hope that Twitter announces its reasoning for why they aren't looking to monetize this, or otherwise use it to their advantage. And soon. Because otherwise, they'll chase away the apps that made Twitter worth using, and when those apps go, the users will follow.