I've written before on this very topic - not building your house / business on other people's platform.
That said, I think there's a real opportunity for Twitter to grow via third party apps by being more open, they just haven't straddled the line of being both a consumer app and infrastructure company well previously.
I agree massively with lots of what Dustin Curtis has previously written about his vision for the platform:
"Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. Nothing great is Built On Twitter, even though it should be the most powerful realtime communications platform on Earth. There are simply no developer integration features for building stuff on top of Twitter as a platform, and that is absurd and disappointing. The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone. And yet the culture around the Twitter community has effectively banned such behavior because the product doesn’t have features to filter/organize such notifications."
They want the (hobbyist? / fun) apps yet, when something sizable comes along, the don't want someone else to run away with the ball. Coming out and saying to smaller indie developers now "If you build something decent, we'll take some revenue" I don't think would placate many. It may have been a decent way to start, but too much water under the bridge IMO.
That's different. Browsers have standards. What works in one browser, generally works in another. Twitter is a monopoly of Twitter. You can't hot plug your now homeless app into a different version of Twitter.
That said, I think there's a real opportunity for Twitter to grow via third party apps by being more open, they just haven't straddled the line of being both a consumer app and infrastructure company well previously.
I agree massively with lots of what Dustin Curtis has previously written about his vision for the platform:
"Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. Nothing great is Built On Twitter, even though it should be the most powerful realtime communications platform on Earth. There are simply no developer integration features for building stuff on top of Twitter as a platform, and that is absurd and disappointing. The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone. And yet the culture around the Twitter community has effectively banned such behavior because the product doesn’t have features to filter/organize such notifications."
http://dcurt.is/twitter
They want the (hobbyist? / fun) apps yet, when something sizable comes along, the don't want someone else to run away with the ball. Coming out and saying to smaller indie developers now "If you build something decent, we'll take some revenue" I don't think would placate many. It may have been a decent way to start, but too much water under the bridge IMO.