In a haste towards monetizing Twitter, it looks the management at Twitter are making decisions that are dampening interest in new developers. Just recently, Twitter has come up with new Developers Rules of the Road listing limitations for third party developers.
Going forward there would be Display Requirements instead of Display Guidelines limiting UI Innovations over twitter statuses. And if number of users of a client is limited to 1 Million if your applications needs user tokens to 1 Lakh if your application uses Timeline and Account Settings. Which means Twitter can hold you, if they turn as big as Uber Twitter or TweetDeck or if you found a better monetizing model.
It is pretty much evident, there were lots of innovations around twitter dominating the services provided by Twitter themselves. Many companies have proved them too:
- Twitter Lists is also a concept of managing tweets first cracked by TweetDeck, Hootsuite etc
- URL Shortnening is a concept that came out of need from Twitter users and was addressed first by third party developers.
- Embedding a pic in a tweet by Twicpic.
- Echofon Firefox plugin made it easy for me to read tweets of people.
- TweetWhatYouSpend(twys) is a service where when user sends a DM with spending amount, category wise to ‘twys’, all expenses get tracked.
There were also lots of UI Innovations for managing loads of tweets. Considering the wide spread of usage of Twitter, it has many other options than throwing up limitations to developers. Here are a few of them:
- Twitter should think of working on a revenue share basis for third party developers with more than a million users or whatever limit they set it to.
- Twitter could also think of a standard license fee for using twitter APIs if user base of the third party services is more than 1 Million. This way the motivation to develop innovations around twitter is not killed.
- Another option is Twitter may look into the Wikipedia model, where it depends on donations of users. Though users would definitely be generous in making donations courtesy the time they spend on twitter, the investors of Twitter may never favour this.
Ultimately Twitter needs to understand that all developers or businesses who work on apps around twitter using Twitter APIs also look for monetizing their effort like what Twitter as a company does. So Twitter should rather come up with a standard developer friendly model by evaluating case by case, than pulling the plug if users are more than a stated number and should have a better monetization model.