In the light of the recent hire of Kevin Thau, someone with sales and business development experience. The pending rate limit seems to imply a more aggressive twitter.
Could cutting back on API limits be the first steps towards paid access to the API?
The API twitter provides is amazingly simple and, as such, has resulted in a tremendous amount of growth. That growth includes 3rd parties developing applications and business models around the API. These applications can often be stuffed into 2 categories. First, an application that sits directly on top of twitter and provides nothing more then 1 or 2 missing features. Second, being the “aggregator” style applications which attempts to combine twitters features with those of their direct competitors.
It would be hard to see how, beside growth, either of these two types of uses for the API could be seen as a positive for Twitter.
TweetDeck, Twhirl sure! single user, desktop, 100 request limit.
FriendFeed, Tweetree…not so much…
Eric, I disagree with your conclusions. The software companies with billion dollar market caps are most often the ones that build massive ecosystems around themselves and enable other companies to make money off of their platform.
1) When dealing with constrained resources, you’ll never release all the features your customers want.
2) In many cases you can directly monetize use of your platform, but even if you don’t charge, the value you enable others to create is an additional form of currency (call it power, force, momentum, whatever) that can be used to expand your reach in the marketplace.
3) Companies that only marginally expand Twitter’s value (such as TweetDeck, which I love) all directly contribute to the growth of Twitter.
4) Companies like FriendFeed, who got an early start by improving Twitter’s functionality and then grew from there, still expand Twitter’s reach. And as a “power user” tool, it is unlikely that FF will ever eclipse Twitter in terms of overall usage.
5) Even whitelabel service, which Ev staunchly opposes, has direct value, if monetized properly. Look at a service like Yammr, which only exists because Twitter hasn’t prioritized groups. If Twitter offered a whitelabel service, then they would further be cementing their place in the enterprise AND earning revenue, instead of sending people to another service. Win / Win vs Lose / Lose.
To put it most plainly, imagine you could go back a couple decades and *own* smtp. Would you honestly say “nah, I’d rather just make an email client”?
I could not agree more, Twiiter has always a ubiquitous messaging system (like smtp) and this move is just the start of them charging for access to their “protocol”.