Chuck Freedman
My HTC Intredible shipped with a Twitter app built-in called Peep. It was cool, but lacked some polish I enjoy with Seesmic’s Twhirl AIR app on my desktop. Being new to Android, I didn’t realize that features like taskbar notifications were available to other apps — so I was really impressed when I saw a little ‘birdie’ icon whenever someone replied/dm’d/or included me in their tweet.
Days after I got my Incredible, I learned that Twitter, themselves, had launched their own Android app. I downloaded and fell in love. Not only did it beat Peep in terms of usability, navigation and ‘Android’ integration, it also surpasses Twhirl. It’s got me wondering now, when will Twitter put out its own desktop-integrated app (not counting the web site) as an alternative to existing 3rd party apps. And if they do, what will the makers of Twhirl, Tweetdeck and many others have to say about it.
Turns out, Twitter is already fostering some bad blood among its own developer community. Up until now, I think developers integrating Twitter APIs felt they had the franchise on building 3rd party, OS/Desktop/Mobile integrated apps. To see the service company now build/acquire apps and offer them as their own is sending the wrong message to developers. It says, “we appreciate you doing what you did and helping grow our user base to millions. Now let us take it from here…”. This is a dangerous message for a service providing company with an abundant platform like Twitter to send.
Members of the developer community have been voicing their opinions starting around Twitter’s developer event “Chirp” (see
“Tensions Rise for Twitter and App Developers” and “Why is Twitter suddenly making its own apps?“) and you can see there’s something interesting brewing here. I’m interested to see how this pans out. While the ‘mashup’ scene has all but faded over the past few years, building apps around 3rd party APIs remains hot. Other companies who have no intention to compete with their developers, as Twitter seems to be doing, will need to make it super clear to avoid potentially negative comparison.
