While the prophets were making predictions about where the river was flowing, thousands of aspiring business leaders and web developers created applications that redirected light from Twitter’s river to fuel their own applications. Ev and Biz, essentially the river gods, didn’t mind these developers leeching off the stream for two reasons:
- Every new 3rd party Twitter app meant another little group of enthusiastic people aggressively promoting Twitter. You need to sign up with Twitter to use a 3rd party application so every person the app developers convinced to sign up for the application meant another user for Twitter.
- Twitter was a giant stream of light and, like most giant streams of light, it didn’t have a lot of cash lying around to spend on testing new functionality with private user groups. The solution? Give developers free access to the stream and let them do the dirty work of figuring out what users really like. This seemed like such a great idea to most developers that they jumped into development without thinking about an end game.
Twitter had an end game in mind though. An application that had enough users to gain momentum in the real time micro blogging space presented a danger to the big river. Why? Because if a 3rd party app can prove a working business model on their platform there’s little to prevent them from buying a bunch of servers and breaking away from the big river entirely.
This made many developers angry because they felt like they deserved a reward for creating something so many users enjoyed. They thought Twitter would let them develop cool new apps and bring the functionality back to the main river by buying out the developers. After all, didn’t Amazon and Google do the same thing for years?
Yes, they did. But there’s one thing that makes all the difference between Twitter and a company like Google or Amazon: money.
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