Twitter’s quest to monetize has pitched it against it developers. The ‘last straw’ being this post effectively banning new Twitter clients and putting the existing ones on a tight leach. Not long ago, Twitter kicked off the most popular Blackberry client UberTwitter of Twitter.The vocal opponents of Twitters new moves are accusing Twitter of biting the fingers that fed them.
While it is undeniable the role twitter clients played in making Twitter gain traction, I would like to bring to their attention one of my favourite quotes
The saying goes, do not bite the fingers that feed you; but maybe you should, if the fingers stop you from feeding yourself.
Twitter cannot survive commercially and repay the $360 million raised (not including the returns expected by the investors) if it does not take control of the complete ecosystem. Period.
The only blame I put on Twitter is their making of this ‘monetization transition’ slow and painful. What they should have done last year when they introduced their client was to strike once and strike finally. “We are sorry guys, thanks for the love but we are taking over EVERYTHING”. That way, the damage would have been done once and for all. We would have forgotten about it one the Wikileaks saga came up. But by trudging slowly towards the inevitable end of absolute control, they are simply creating a lot of ‘haters’.
I am Oo, founder of GBEDU.FM where I hope to make sense of this business of music. I once tried to kill the business card with OnePage.