“Perhaps of greatest concern is that while it has been deprecating third-party apps, Twitter has been slow to update its own apps on the various desktop and mobile platforms, and that they do not offer the functionality or ease of use that other clients do - and that it would be impossible to offer the range of experiences that other apps try to offer.”
TEAM UPPER RIGHT QUADRANT
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The Guardian: 'Twitter horrifies third-party developers with warnings of cutoffs' -
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Why people care about the upper right quadrant.
It’s where humanity happens.
A place so good that it changed the world.
One degree of separation between all people.
Something so powerful we’d be happy to pay for it.
But Twitter chose advertising.
It’s time for the upper right quadrant to choose.
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An explanation of what Twitter did to unite Team Upper Right Quadrant on shortformblog:
Day of reckoning: Twitter wants to kill the ecosystem around your favorite third-party apps
A couple of hours ago, the company’s Michael Sippey writing a blog post about the company’s API which wants to discourage certain types of apps from growing. What types of apps, you ask? Basically, anything described in the upper-right quadrant of this graphic. What types of apps are those? Well …
In the upper right-hand quadrant are services that enable users to interact with Tweets, like the Tweet curation service Storify or the Tweet discovery site Favstar.fm.
That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, “traditional” Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.
As we pointed out recently, the Twitter alternative App.Net came to being out of reaction to some decisions Twitter was making about the company’s ecosystem. By actively discouraging development of these kinds of apps — stuff that front-facing consumers use — and enforcing limits on the size of developer apps (100,000 users or, if you’re already huge, 200 percent of your current userbase) Twitter may force the hand of certain developers to leave the service. Now, to be clear, Twitter can allow some of these apps to further expand, but based on this document, they may just say no. So to put it simply, if truly innovative things like Storify can’t grow in this model anymore, Twitter encourages them to leave. This is an incredibly poorly-considered decision and will cost them in the long term as a platform.
