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by mschonfeld 5026 days ago
Actually, they do. Maybe not legally, but practically, Twitter owes many of its users to a handful of successful API clients. You can't just "use" developers (or, companies) to build up your user-base, and then as soon as it gets convenient for you, just ditch 'em all together...
2 comments
ewillbefull 5026 days ago
> You can't just "use" developers

Actually, you can, they did, and any developers who thought they were entitled to anything from Twitter don't understand platform risk and learned a lesson.

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justinhj 5026 days ago
At some point you start losing users who are affected by apps they use suddenly not working any more. If they care to find out why it makes a bad impression. If it happens multiple times they will think about switching to a rival service. There's virtually nothing keeping users on Twitter if a rival service popped up and their friends started moving there.
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csallen 5026 days ago
> There's virtually nothing keeping users on Twitter if a rival service popped up and their friends started moving there.

That's like saying, "There's virtually nothing keeping people on Earth if we develop cheap, reliable, faster-than-light space travel."

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justinhj 5026 days ago
So you're saying creating a rival service to Twitter would be as hard as creating faster than light space travel?

All I'm talking about is gradual migrations like the ones from geocities and myspace. In the case of those services users had a lot of content they'd created that they had to leave behind. By it's ephemeral nature Twitter has very little of that.

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csallen 5026 days ago
No, I'm saying that the value of Twitter isn't the product itself, it's the people using it. I don't get on Twitter because of the allure of a 140-character-limited textbox. I get on Twitter because it's the only place I can receive regular personal updates from my idols, role-models, and colleagues, and even engage them in conversation. The more people on Twitter, the more valuable it becomes to me.

You can build a rival service if you want, but nobody will use it until it provides value, it won't provide value until people use it.

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justinhj 5024 days ago
By that logic everybody would still be using Yahoo search
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hiphopopotamus 5023 days ago
Of course you can.

Just like the developers would ditch Twitter for the next big thing if it ever pulled a MySpace.

There was a mutually beneficial relationship that is no longer (as) beneficial to one of the parties.

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