The romance between Twitter and its outside developers has hit a rough patch, one that Chief Executive Evan Williams, along with many Twitter developers, saw coming.
The storm began on Wednesday, when Fred Wilson, the Union Square Ventures partner who invested in Twitter and serves on its board of directors, wrote a blog post. He said that many of the current apps — which do things like post photos to Twitter, shorten URLs or make Twitter accessible on cellphones — were filling holes in Twitter, and he is waiting for new “killer apps” that go beyond that.
Some Twitter developers are worried, and even started a Twitter hashtag to discuss it, #unionoftwitterapps. But software developers who build on top of platforms have always experienced the same give and take, other developers say.
“There’s some misunderstanding around platforms,” Mr. Williams, also a Twitter founder, said in a recent interview before the storm blew through the blogosphere. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to developers about this.”
The tension is natural, he said. “There are tons of opportunities created by the Twitter platform, and things that people will probably be disappointed if they invest in,” he said. “It’s a question of what should be left up to the ecosystem and what should be created on the platform.”
Twitter will continue to buy or develop apps and features it needs, even if third-party developers already provide them, Mr. Williams said.
Twitter bought Summize in 2008 because it realized it needed a search engine. “There could be other stuff like that, that completes the platform and makes it better,” he said. “Since we’re still evolving, that may happen more.”
There are also “features built for Twitter that maybe only exist in client applications, and we’re going to build them in because they should be there,” he said.
CoTweet, for example, added a feature to sign Twitter posts when multiple people use the same account, and Twitter is now testing a similar feature. And a site called TLists was live before Twitter unveiled its own Lists feature.
As usual, Twitter will make new features available to developers to build into their applications, which will increase the value of those apps, he said.
As Dave Winer wrote on his blog, discord between developers and platforms has been going on since the dawn of platforms. Certain start-ups that built software to fill holes in Microsoft and Apple’s products flourished until those companies incorporated the features into their own software and put the start-ups out of business.
At Twitter, developers “rushed to fill those holes, but eventually we’re going to have to do that,” Mr. Williams said. “But we also think there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that we’re not interested in doing or have no plans to, and that presents a greater opportunity than filling these gaps.”
Those opportunities are what Twitter plans to talk about at Chirp, its first developer conference in San Francisco next week, which seems to be very well timed indeed.