You guys are WRONG Twitter will keep getting huge and growing WITH its developers.
It’s been a really stressful few days for the Twitter developers from the announcements of Friday to this decisive day of Chirp. Chirp started really with a fresh room this morning, ask Ryan Sarver when he said his goal was developer happiness and asked us “are you happy” and a minority answered, obviously still under shock from Twitter competing more with its developers. There were in fact some more bad news for the developers today: Evan Williams confirmed an Android app and hinted that bit.ly would be removed as url shortener as well as the high probability that they will integrate media (photo services come to mind).
I have had an interesting week myself, it started with Michael Arrington explaining that I was in denial with an awesome picture to defin e the situation, then emails from friends, partners sorry to hear that we are going to be in huge difficulties competing with Twitter and some employees literally wondering if they would have a job (think about my mobile developers who were told by Fred Wilson that they should stop filling holes). My morning has been mostly populated by meetings with friends and press looking totally sorry as if someone had died in my family.
I am focusing myself on the good news from Twitter itself
-strong commitment to keep the APIs open and not use internal APIs only for themselves
-make Twitter.com use the same public APIs as everyone else such as m.twitter.com is doing (great that means we will have the same tools to play with)
-streaming live feed for desktop clients and Twitter does not seem to be investing much in desktop clients (Tweetie desktop will ship but I don’t expect much action there)
Trust is back and investments will keep going big time in the space
-Evan, Biz, Dick, Ryan and the entire Twitter team restored trust, it was my biggest concern, that we (and therefore the investors community) would be so uncertain about the next Twitter moves that the space would get frozen by lack of investments from VCs and scared developers. They did a great job answering all the questions in an open and straight conversation.
-I felt the room was reassured and warm in the afternoon, lots of private conversations confirming that people were less worried
-Realtime investor star Ron Conway has set the tone and said that he will invest even more in the space, and Ron is a trend setter. No doubt it will happen. I bet Twitter will come with its own fund like Facebook did.
Developers still have to adapt to this new deal
-Guy Kawasaki has a great post and very funny videos too. Basically developers who are angry should shut up (they already did) and keep rockin’
-Twitter launching its own mobile clients is a great challenge for many, including my own company and here is how we adapt. Expect all Seesmic products to be GREAT for Twitter but also support more and more networks as we already started.
-the new Twitter moves actually has reinforced us. We are launching today our Seesmic Desktop Platform and there is a huge attention from developers and partners around it
-most Twitter app with “tweet” something in their names will change their names very quickly
-many developers will integrated other services like we do to decrease their risk, but I don’t think this will affect the Twitter growth and it’s a good safe move for them
The net is Twitter rocks. As Evan said, the more users on Twitter the more opportunities for us developers and I agree I am very impressed by its management and what happened last week is mostly due to a poor communication which they have already started correcting. There will be plenty of holes to fill in the future that won’t get destroyed by Twitter. Let’s keep it up and change the way people consume the news for ever as well as stay in touch with their friends.
It’s only a beginning, the real time web phenomenon is on its way for real and for years.