When Twitter first released its new API rules in August — and changed what had been guidelines into hard-and-fast requirements about the way tweets are displayed, among other things — the company specifically said that Storify was an example of a service that added value to Twitter in a useful way, and therefore wasn’t at risk of being shut down or restricted like some other applications. Although the infamous “quadrant of death” graph that was published around this time made it seem as though Storify could be caught by the new restrictions, director of platform Ryan Sarver said that Storify was safe.

When I dropped in on co-founders Burt Herman and Xavier Damman recently in San Francisco and asked them about the potential for future conflict with Twitter, they said they were happy that the company had highlighted them as adding value, but both still seemed somewhat uneasy about the future — although Damman’s earlier response to a similar question (asked on Twitter, of course) shows that he sees any competition from the company as a challenge rather than a disaster:

@mathewi we can’t wait. Ask @foursquare what they think of @facebook entering the check-in space. It can only make us stronger. #ona12

—
Xavier Damman (@xdamman) September 22, 2012

Trying to become less reliant on Twitter’s API

I asked Herman about both of these potential issues in a follow-up phone interview — an audio recording of which is embedded below — and he said Storify believes that it is doing something very different from what Twitter might do if and when it offers curation tools, and that it is also about much more than just a way to curate tweets. Herman also said that the company is working on making it easier for users to pull in tweets without having to go through the Twitter API, and that it sees tweets as public information it should be able to gather however it wants to:

“It’s certainly Twitter’s right to do what they want to with their API, and so the more sustainable solution for a company is to figure out ways of doing what they need without using the Twitter API… We don’t want to be reliant on anybody — we want to be the place where you can collect public quotes from any service on the web [so] we’re hoping to make that easier and at the same time not be dependent on anyone’s API.”

That kind of reluctance to integrate too much with Twitter is probably the single biggest negative outcome from the company’s recent changes. For startups like Storify, deciding where to focus their energy is an important task, and the uncertainty around what Twitter might do in the future makes it difficult to know how to proceed. If it could change its mind so suddenly about which apps or services it should support, what would stop it from doing so again?

So one risk for Storify is the potential for unknown future changes to Twitter’s API rules that would leave the service — and its users — hanging, and force the company to either turn off some features or restructure the way it does things in order to get onside.

Storify wants to curate more than just Twitter

A related issue is that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has talked about how the company wants to offer journalists and media organizations tools that will help them curate tweets more easily, the way that Twitter has been doing for its media partners during official events such as the Summer Olympics or the federal election. That sounds an awful lot like what Storify does. But Herman says he isn’t concerned:

“We’re not just tied to Twitter — we really want to be a curation tool for all of the social web, and that includes Instagram and Facebook and Tumblr and YouTube and Flickr and Vimeo and whatever else comes along… it is true that Twitter is a great source of real-time information, but there’s definitely more out there.”

Herman also noted that Twitter’s recent attempts at curation for specific events such as the Summer Olympics and NASCAR seemed to be more devoted to a real-time or social TV experience, and that Storify sees a big part of its value as being the ability to highlight content after an event. “We’re used for real time too, but we’re also about being a record of something that is lasting, not just a reaction in the moment,” he said. “So these are the best things people are saying or photos that are being posted about the topic — things that stand for more than just the second you happen to glance by.”

The Storify founder said that a large proportion of the content within the service still comes from Twitter — perhaps in part because tweets are so short that it’s easy to include a lot of them in a Storify module, whereas people likely wouldn’t include dozens of videos or photos. But it’s also true that the real-time nature of the Twitter stream and the speed with which it flows by is one of the main reasons why curation tools like Storify are so necessary, and that makes it feel as though the two services are joined at the hip. Whether Herman and Damman can successfully separate them remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Umberto Salvagnin

Now Pearson is giving developers the opportunity to remix some of its best-known books for themselves, through two new API data sets:

• It is making available 90,000 raw images, of the kind how-to and guide book publisher Dorling Kindsersley (DK) has become famous for, including of human anatomy, city maps, scientific images and stock photography.
• Meanwhile, Pearson’s Penguin book publisher is making available 48 classic titles from 31 authors including the Brontë sisters, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy.

The two new APIs go live on what is the first birthday of Pearson’s Plug & Play developer program. Pearson wants to regard some of its content as raw building blocks for third-party developers to make new apps and services from.

The group began its developer program in 2011 with three APIs, so that developers could re-use its Eyewitness Guides city data, Longman dictionary definitions and Financial Times press releases to create new products.

This March, the giant unveiled its first chargeable API that allows developers to re-use a library of 2,500 food recipes from its cooking books, with developers needing to pay after hitting a certain monthly usage.

Pearson, which made around $2 billion from digital content last year, will claim credit for embracing small-scale developers using this home-spun outreach tactic. But it likely won’t make available in this way full premium content from its Financial Times or education services.

So far, Pearson is showcasing 12 real-world re-uses of its material. Commercial payback to the group is not known. We have asked.

Some of the comments during a back-and-forth discussion we had on Twitter were interesting, so I thought I would excerpt them here, and also include a Storify collection of the debate as well. I’m hoping to talk more about this and other topics with the former Twitter CEO at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference in November.

During his time as Twitter’s CEO, Williams had to deal with the beginnings of Twitter’s transformation from a cool project into an actual revenue-generating company, as it started to acquire third-party apps and caused a backlash among developers that is very similar to the one it is facing today. Williams left Twitter in 2010 when he was replaced by Dick Costolo, and formed a startup incubator called Obvious Corp. with former Twitter colleague Biz Stone (which recently launched a new-media publishing platform called Medium) but the former CEO has remained an advisor to the company and a board member.

While Twitter was trying to figure out in 2010 which external services it wanted to incorporate and which it wanted to leave alone — a process that angel investor Chris Dixon compared to “a drunk guy with an Uzi” — Williams admitted that the company had screwed up its relationship with developers, and Twitter held a whole conference for developers called Chirp that was supposed to try and repair that relationship. In reality, however, the tensions between where Twitter wanted the company to go and how that was going to affect third-party apps remained just below the surface, and erupted again recently after moves like the announcement of new API rules and the shutting off of features to services like Tumblr and Instagram.

What role has the ecosystem played?

Our Twitter discussion started when Williams mentioned a phrase from my recent post about the company’s ongoing struggle with being open vs. controlling the network. I argued that much of the early power and growth of the network came from being open, since many of the things we associated with Twitter — such as the @ mention for users, the hashtag, and even the retweet — were not developed by the company but came from the users themselves, in many cases assisted by third-party apps. But Williams said that this influence is “a common myth but completely overblown”:

@mathewi "virtually all of the network’s power and growth has come from outside the company itself"—a common myth but completely overblown

—
Evan Williams (@ev) September 06, 2012

At this point, Anil Dash — who used to work for blogging platform Six Apart and now has a media consulting firm — agreed with Williams that the focus on how much of a role third-party apps played in Twitter’s success is overstated:

@mathewi I think the "Twitter was made by third party things" is mostly nerd triumphalism, not factual. Shaq did more than any indie app.

—
Anil Dash (@anildash) September 06, 2012

Dash also noted that some of the elements we associate with Twitter — even hashtags, which Chris Messina (now of Google) was the first to use on Twitter — were used in other ways on the internet before Twitter came along, and others noted that the @ symbol was also used on services such as Internet Relay Chat. Williams then pointed out that if it wasn’t for the company’s decision to incorporate and support those features, they would never have become part of Twitter to begin with.

@mathewi @anildash This is how products evolve. You have 1M ideas—some come from usage, some from inside. You pick and choose carefully.

—
Evan Williams (@ev) September 06, 2012

I tried to argue that the point wasn’t to try and determine which played a larger role, the ecosystem or Twitter itself and the decisions it made (some of which irritated users, such as the decision to implement retweets in a different way). The point for me is that the relationship between users — and third-party services — and Twitter has always been much more symbiotic than it has a traditional company-user dynamic. And a big part of that was a wide-open API that let tweets flow wherever they wanted to, something Twitter has been busy shutting down.

Ethan Kaplan, a developer who is a vice-president at Live Nation and used to work for Warner Brothers Records, put it well when he said that all developers really want is for Twitter to admit the relationship is symbiotic, rather than parasitic:

@mathewi @chrismessina ultimately what we all want is twitter to stop treating their ecosystem as parasitic. It isn’t. It’s symbiotic.

—
Ethan Kaplan (@ethank) September 06, 2012

And Chris Messina — who noted that the third-party app Tweetie (which Twitter ultimately acquired and turned into the official iPhone app) was the first to support hashtags — said that one of the things the company has failed to do is to make it clear who it is making all of its recent changes for. As I’ve pointed out before, it argues that it is doing so for users, but is that really the case? I have to admit that I’m not convinced.

@ethank @mathewi is it that? It feels like there's not sufficient transparency behind the motivation for the changes. Who're they *for*?

—
Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) September 06, 2012

I’ve embedded the full version of the Storify below, with as many of the comments as I could find (apologies to those whose contributions I missed). Interestingly enough, Twitter has said that the new API rules aren’t meant to apply to services like Storify, even though the company seems to fall into the wrong quadrant of customer product lead Michael Sippey’s by-now-infamous chart.

[View the story "Evan Williams on Twitter and its ecosystem" on Storify]

Evan Williams on Twitter and its ecosystem

Storified by Mathew Ingram · Thu, Sep 06 2012 15:45:46

In a recent post on my love-hate relationship with Twitter, I discussed how much I appreciate what the network has been able to provide in terms of being a real-time, open and distributed platform for publishing — and what an important role I think that has played in making us more informed about things like the Arab Spring revolutions, for example, thanks to the crowdsourced journalism of people like Andy Carvin of National Public Radio. But I also said that I hate the fact that Twitter is closing down third-party access by other platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, and that its desire to control more of its network seems to suggest that being open and having a good business are mutually exclusive.

Can you be truly open and still build a business?

Wilson, an early backer of Twitter — and someone who has also written a number of posts in defense of the open approach to community-building and the importance of being free — said that he believes being open and building a business can go together. But he added an important caveat: Being open, the Union Square VC said, is something that should come later and be done gradually, not right out of the gate the way Twitter did it. As Wilson puts it in his post:

“It is better to open up slowly, cautiously, and carefully rather than start out wide open and then close up every time an existential threat appears on the horizon… [Twitter] started out completely open, which allowed anyone to build a third party client, grab a huge percentage of Twitter users, and then threaten to take them away from Twitter. That’s not a sustainable relationship.”

This is Twitter’s dilemma in a nutshell: As we and others have pointed out a number of times, virtually all of the network’s power and growth has come from outside the company itself, in a way that is unlike almost any other significant social network. As Sarah Lacy notes in a post about Twitter’s unlikely success, every one of the important elements of the service — from the @ mention feature to the hashtag, and even the retweet — was developed by users, not the company itself. And now those same features are the ones the company is desperately trying to monetize to justify its financial market value.

In many ways, you could argue that even Twitter itself didn’t realize what the network was capable of until these things started to emerge — and I think they only emerged because the company decided to be as open as possible right from the beginning. It had a fully open API that third-party developers could use to do whatever they wanted, right down to creating a Twitter client that essentially competed with the service. As this problem became more and more obvious, the company started acquiring (and in some cases shutting down) other apps and services, and it has been stepping that behavior up recently.

Twitter is trying to turn back the clock

Doing this is probably a financial necessity in many ways — especially since Twitter is trying to justify all the money that it has taken from VCs over the years, as Hunter Walk of YouTube has pointed out — and so it is likely inevitable. And it doesn’t necessarily have to mean that Twitter shuts out third parties altogether, or clamps down on its network to the exclusion of all others: the company’s co-founder and chief product visionary, Jack Dorsey, said in a recent interview that he sees this process as “shepherding” the ecosystem towards a specific goal rather than shutting it down.

But what if the shepherd is herding the flock towards a cliff, or just fattening them up for slaughter? Mike McCue, co-founder of Flipboard — and a former member of the board of directors at Twitter until he resigned last month — told the Telegraph that he is concerned that Twitter is closing down too much and that it risks losing some of the power it used to have. As he puts it:

“Twitter can be incredibly valuable as an open communications mechanism but, if you close too many things down too quickly… you could easily do a lot of damage to that ecosystem. Twitter was created as an open platform, an open communications ecosystem, and I hope it can stay that way. You have to be really careful not to let money get in the way of that.”

So if Fred Wilson is right and Twitter made a mistake by being too open in the beginning, its current evolution is an attempt to turn back the clock or rewrite history — in other words, it is trying to find a way to undo some or all of the things that made it so powerful and fast-growing in the first place, while still hanging on to the value that being open created, so that it can monetize it. Facebook is also trying to monetize a user base that is built on free content, but it started closed and has become (somewhat) more open over time, which is a completely different challenge.

What Twitter is trying to do is a little like Wikipedia — something that has huge social value but is not a very good business — suddenly shutting down or controlling access to its content and inserting ads into everything. Is such a radical transformation even possible, or will the pressure be too great and cause cracks that rip the network apart in the process, or destroy its original value? We are about to find out.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Fabio Venni and See-ming Lee

It’s hard to believe sometimes that Twitter has only been around for a few years as a mainstream media phenomenon, since it has become such a central part of how many of us live our lives — and in my case, at least, how we do our jobs as well. I have a second screen with Tweetdeck open all day long so that I can follow the stream (I follow about 2,700 people), and I have spent years curating lists of important or interesting users in technology and media that I use to track those topics. Both in a personal sense and a work sense, there are hundreds of people I would never have met if it wasn’t for Twitter. It has literally changed my life.

All of that said, however, there are things I don’t like about the service — including my apparent inability to stop using it (which of course is largely my fault, not Twitter’s). And I have to confess that I am concerned about where the network is going based on some of the company’s recent behavior. So here are five things I love and five things I hate about Twitter:

What do I love about Twitter? Real-time news:

• I love the fact that Twitter gives me real-time information about an incredible variety of things, whether it’s an earthquake or the fact that someone just died (assuming it isn’t another Twitter celebrity-death hoax) and it does so far more quickly than the television news or anything since the old days of news radio. Twitter is like a police-band radio for the entire world.
• I love that I get a broad variety of viewpoints, both from traditional sources like news outlets and from alternative sources, including people who just happen to be in the right place at the right time (or the wrong time, depending on your viewpoint). I like the fact that taking the pulse of the news is as easy as picking up my phone or hearing the “bing” of an incoming tweet.
• I love that I can get into discussions (and occasionally arguments) at a moment’s notice with someone I respect because of their output but may never have actually met, and that others can join in. And those discussions can happen organically, rather than having to invite someone to a specific location or convince them to sign up with a new service.
• I love that the brevity of a tweet forces me to be concise and forces me to consider what I am really trying to say and how to say it. This does sometimes turn into a “bumper-sticker” level debate, but it also introduces a lot of discipline, and as a writer I enjoy that.
• I love that Twitter provides anyone with the ability to publish their thoughts or their feelings or opinions with very little effort, because I think the value that comes from opinions other than our own is worth putting up with a little noise for. I like that Twitter lowers the barriers to real-time information distribution, as co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams has said.

What do I hate? Addiction and control issues

• As I mentioned above, I don’t like the fact that I am more or less addicted to Twitter now, to the point where I’m not sure what I would do without it. Someone asked me what I would do if the network disappeared, and I said that I figured I could go back to just blogging and comments — but it wouldn’t be the same. It would be like losing a friend, or missing a great dinner party.
• I also hate that Twitter has become so big now, and has turned into much more of a broadcast network than somewhere you can really talk to people (I think this is part of the appeal of new networks like Google+ and App.net). Most people never post anything to the network, they just follow celebrities or sports teams, and those kinds of accounts rarely interact with “normal” people. The idea of Twitter as a conversational tool seems to be dying.
• I hate that Twitter seems to be trying very hard to become a broadcast network, and to be best friends with TV networks. I know the company has to make money if it is to continue to grow, but I don’t need new ways to find out what is on television. It might be selfish, but I liked it when Twitter seemed to care more about helping people spread the news about revolutions in Egypt than helping drive eyeballs to prime-time TV shows.
• I hate that Twitter is cutting off the third-party services I like to use — including Instagram and Tumblr and potentially plenty of others. I hate the fact that I am now nervous about devoting time to Flipboard or Storify because I am afraid they will suddenly disappear or no longer be able to function the way they used to. I don’t think this kind of war on outsiders is necessary, and I hate the way it makes Twitter look cheap and desperate.
• Lastly, I hate that Twitter’s metamorphosis seems to reinforce the idea that being an open network — one that allows the easy distribution of content across different platforms, the way that blogging and email networks do –isn’t possible, or at least can’t become a worthwhile business. And I hate the fact that trying to justify a private-market valuation cooked up by venture capitalists seems to be driving the company, rather than what is good for users.

Obviously, I am not going to stop using Twitter anytime soon, regardless of what I don’t like about it. There just isn’t any other network that is going to give me what I get from Twitter, without me spending hundreds of hours of time and energy spent trying to duplicate what I have built on top of the service. But at the same time, I am not happy with a lot of what is going on — or what the company’s actions seem to suggest the future might look like — and so I am watching new networks like Google+ and App.net with interest.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users bryan and See-ming Lee

A recent blog post from the Knight Center for Journalism at the University of Texas does a pretty good job of summarizing why some journalists and media executives might be uneasy about their relationship with Twitter and how they have come to rely on the network. Among other things, the post mentions the restrictions that the company recently announced on its API, which primarily affect third-party developers and apps — but could also wind up penalizing newspapers and other media outlets that have built their own features or services around Twitter using the same API. As the Knight Center post describes it:

“Recent changes to Twitter’s application programming interface (API) rattled some critics concerned about how journalists will use the popular social media platform to cover news in the future [and] beyond the recent API announcement, Twitter has seen a progression of censorship as the company matures that may threaten its credibility as a news source.”

Will media be treated the same as third-party apps?

One of the things that Twitter’s new API restrictions specifically prohibit (without special permission from the company) is mixing tweets from its network with content from other social networks or sources. But as University of British Columbia journalism professor and former BBC staffer Alfred Hermida notes in a recent post about the changes, these rules could also hit newspapers and other outlets that either generate their own curated feeds of content from Twitter and other sources, as the New York Times has done for the Republican National Convention and other events, or use tools such as ScribbleLive and Storify to do so.

So far, Twitter has said that Storify is safe from any repercussions due to the changes — despite the fact that the service (which was founded by former foreign correspondent Burt Herman) appears to be offering features that are frowned on by Twitter, according to the company’s somewhat confusing chart of good vs. bad apps. But given the way that the network has changed its modus operandi recently, by closing off external services such as Tumblr and Instagram and removing referrer links, it’s difficult to know how long that stay of execution might last for something like Storify. If a newspaper or media outlet has made that a key part of their journalistic process, they could be in for a rude awakening.

In a sense, media companies are suffering the same kind of angst that many developers and startups are feeling as Twitter evolves from being an open real-time information utility into a media entity driven by the need for advertising revenue to justify its market valuation. Just as those third-party services have built businesses on top of Twitter’s API because it was free, newspapers and other media outlets have come to rely on the network for the same reason — and could wind up regretting it in much the same way.

Twitter seems happy to have relationships with certain specific media entities, but for the most part they are television networks like NBC — which the company worked closely with during the recent Summer Olympics — and MTV, which is going to be making use of Twitter in a number of ways during its big Video Music Awards event later this month. Although many users seemed irritated by NBC’s delaying tactics during the Olympics, the head of Twitter’s media team, Chloe Sladden, told the New York Times that the network viewed the partnership as a huge success because it acted as “an amazing daytime teaser trailer driving people into prime time.”

Twitter wants to partner with some, compete with others

If you are a prominent media player such as the New York Times or the Washington Post, you can also get access to the “expanded tweets” or “Twitter cards” feature that the information network recently launched, which is the basis for much of its planned expansion. That allows more of your content to be shown inside a frame on the company’s website or inside its mobile apps — but as we’ve explained, this seems to be almost as much of a competitive move by Twitter as it does a helpful one for media companies, since Twitter is the one who gets the benefit of that content.

Meanwhile, as the Knight Center post noted, some media outlets are concerned about where Twitter’s desire to partner with TV networks and brands like NBC and MTV might take it, since the company was criticized fairly heavily for suspending the account of a British journalist who took potshots at its corporate partner during the Olympics. A Twitter spokesman said this was a misunderstanding related to the journalist’s posting of an NBC executive’s email address, but for many the incident was a critical breach of trust — and a sign that Twitter can and will control or even censor the content on its network as it sees fit.

And so, media outlets are left with a dilemma: Twitter is hugely useful in a whole variety of ways, and it has become a crucial part of much political and social news coverage. But at the same time, relying on a proprietary and increasingly competitive service for a key part of your business can be unwise, whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, and sooner or later media companies are going to have to confront that reality and figure out how to deal with it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mathias and Abysim

The Tumblr news didn’t come as that much of a surprise to anyone that has been following recent events, since Twitter has already cut off other apps such as Instagram. In fact, Matt Buchanan at Buzzfeed wrote a post on Wednesday about how the blog network could be the next target for Twitter and within a matter of hours Tumblr lost the ability to connect to Twitter.

In the case of Instagram, Twitter’s removal of those connection rights — which allowed users to find and connect with any Twitter followers who also use the photo-sharing app — seemed as though it might have been driven in part by a desire to play hardball with Instagram’s new owner, Facebook. But Tumblr isn’t owned by a competitor: If anything, the blog network has been a close partner of Twitter’s, up to and including building in support for the newly introduced “Twitter cards” that show expanded information about tweets.

Twitter cut Tumblr off even though it is a partner

Despite those ties, Twitter decided to shut off Tumblr’s ability to show users their Twitter friends, a decision that even one Twitter engineer apparently doesn’t agree with. And Tumblr was clearly disappointed by the move, saying in a statement delivered to a number of blogs:

“To our dismay, Twitter has restricted our users’ ability to “Find Twitter Friends” on Tumblr. Given our history of embracing their platform, this is especially upsetting. Our syndication feature is responsible for hundreds of millions of tweets, and we eagerly enabled Twitter Cards across 70 million blogs and 30 billion posts as one of Twitter’s first partners… We are truly disappointed by Twitter’s decision.”

The key to the move, and to the similar action taken against Instagram, is contained in the only comment that Twitter has so far made publicly about either decision — after cutting off access to the friend-finder ability on Instagram, the company said simply that: “We understand that there’s great value associated with Twitter’s follow graph data, and we can confirm that it is no longer available within Instagram.” Twitter pointed to this statement after the Tumblr decision as well, saying it had nothing to add.

As designer and developer Dustin Curtis of Svbtle described in a post about Twitter’s recent behavior, a huge amount of Twitter’s value to both users and external services is tied up in its follower graph — that is, the index of all a user’s friends and connections, which in turn are a direct representation of their interests. That “interest graph” is what gives Twitter any power it might have to target advertising, to customize search results, to promote tweets, and all the other things it is trying to do in order to monetize its platform and justify its market value.

Unlike Facebook, where users are normally connected with their friends via other means, that interest graph represents all the power that Twitter has over a user. So it’s not surprising the company would want to control that feature as closely as possible, and even turn it into a monetization strategy (it’s not clear whether Twitter asked Tumblr to pay for access or whether it was just removed). The only question now is whether apps like Flipboard — which also had close ties to Twitter, until CEO Mike McCue left the board of directors — will suffer the same fate.

The future is driving eyeballs to television programs

As it cuts off the third-party developers (and in some cases users) who helped generate much of its success, signs of where Twitter is headed are also abundant: They can be seen in the deals that the company has signed with corporate partners such as NBC, which led to an official Twitter hub where curated information about the Olympics appeared — and also caused a significant amount of controversy when the company suspended the account of a journalist who was critical of NBC. In a comment about the partnership, Twitter’s VP for media, Chloe Sladden, said:

“It’s not fair to describe Twitter as a spoiler mechanism. What we saw is that it was an amazing daytime teaser trailer driving people into prime time.”

In other words, despite the critical protests of users who popularized the hashtag #NBCfail — because of the TV network’s decision to post tweets about events that weren’t going to be broadcast in the U.S. for hours — and despite the fact that the NBC deal forced Twitter to geo-block anyone outside the U.S. from seeing anything on its official hub, the company was more than happy with the relationship because it drove lots of people to watch television. As media relationships become a bigger part of Twitter’s future, which they will almost certainly do, that kind of argument is going to define the company’s vision of success.

The only question that remains is whether enough users want Twitter to become that kind of media entity, with all the controls and restrictions and advertising messages that come with it. It’s possible that — as some have argued — the third-party developers who are complaining about their treatment by the company are no longer relevant, and that those users who have been supporting alternatives like App.net are simply misguided. Or Twitter may have miscalculated badly, and sealed its fate as yet another media entity scrambling to promote its ads to a declining user base, just as MySpace did.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

Beneath all the sound and fury from developers, however, is a kernel of truth that Twitter would do well to consider: namely, that one of the reasons why external apps and services have been — and continue to be — such an important part of the company’s growth and success is that many of its own products are frequently underwhelming at best. If the point of the new API changes is to control more of the ecosystem and the Twitter experience, then the company had better make sure that experience is as good as it can possibly be, or it risks losing the very user base it is hoping to monetize, as others have in the past.

As Harry McCracken notes in a post at Techland, the description of the changes from consumer product lead Michael Sippey does a pretty poor job of explaining what kind of behavior Twitter is in favor of and what kind it isn’t, and it doesn’t really give users any kind of guidance at all when it comes to which apps or services they should feel comfortable using. The confusing table included in the post — with quadrants for different apps and abstract descriptions rather than names — obscured a lot more than it revealed, as highlighted by the fact that many people couldn’t tell whether Storify was one of the “good” apps or one of the bad ones and the director of platform Ryan Sarver was forced to try to clarify that with a tweet.

The new rules have their defenders, including some who argue that Twitter is at least providing some firm guidance for developers, since its attitude toward third-party apps and services has been the subject of a lot of fear and uncertainty. Others have made the point that placing limits on API use makes perfect sense for a company that is trying to generate revenue from its network, as opposed to giving every developer with an app a free ride, and that the limits are not onerous (although Bottlenose founder Nova Spivack argues that Twitter could actually make as much or more money by licensing the use of its API).

But while the limits on API use and the requirements for how Twitter can be used may not look extreme, the message behind them seems to be clear. As entrepreneur and venture investor Chris Dixon put it, ”If you make a Twitter client, you should stop and make something else.” Instapaper developer Marco Arment has a similar view of the changes, saying they are obviously designed to make it difficult for other services to make use of what Twitter sees as its core functionality, to the point where one clause about how tweets must be displayed even appears to threaten popular aggregation apps like Flipboard. As Arment put it:

“Apps cannot interleave chronological groups of Twitter posts with anything else. This is very broad and will bite more services and apps than you may expect. It’s probably the clause that caused the dispute with LinkedIn, and why Flipboard CEO Mike McCue just left Twitter’s board.”

Squashing third-party apps means pain for users

The fact that Flipboard and Tweetbot — a popular mobile client — and possibly even services like Storify are threatened by Twitter’s moves highlights an important point: The company claims that these changes are being made to provide a “consistent user experience,” implying that all it really wants is to save users from irritating or poorly designed services. But the reason why people use apps and services like Flipboard, Tweetbot and Hootsuite in the first place is that they provide something useful that Twitter doesn’t. How does throttling or even extinguishing those kinds of apps help users? Just like the decision to pull tweets out of Google search, users are the ones who ultimately seem to pay for these kinds of moves.

One of the things that makes Tweetbot appealing as a mobile Twitter client, at least to me, is that it is consistently faster and better designed than the official mobile app and has a number of useful features that Twitter’s app doesn’t. As more than one person has pointed out, the company’s mobile web app and even its regular website also leave a lot to be desired in terms of usability, and the iPad app and Mac OS X apps appear to be the redheaded stepchildren of the family: They get few (if any) updates, and in some cases they may not even meet Twitter’s new display and usage guidelines.

It’s true that relatively few people use third-party apps, and so some have argued the developer angst and outcry isn’t worth paying attention to. But if this rationale is taken far enough, it turns into a kind of “we can do whatever we want, and users will have to put up with it” attitude, and that could be very dangerous indeed. As I have argued before, MySpace and Digg are a examples of companies that put the demands of revenue generation and business models ahead of what their users wanted, and they paid the price. They may not have had third-party developers, but the outcome was the same.

In a debate with John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who says Twitter is effectively telling developers to “drop dead,” Anil Dash argued that the company’s restrictions aren’t that different from what Apple has done with its app store and developer community. But unlike Twitter, Apple had a successful and attractive platform that developers were clamoring for access to. The platform Twitter is now trying to monetize would not have achieved much of its value if it wasn’t for the developers it is now spurning. Will it have the same value if they leave?

Furthermore, Apple’s focus has also always been on users and the user experience, and its requirements for developers — however draconian they seemed – have stemmed from that impulse. Twitter wants to portray its changes and restrictions in the same way, but it is a much harder argument to buy. It feels as though the company’s need to justify its $8 billion market value is taking precedence over everything else, and developers — and users — are getting caught in the crossfire.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Rosaura Ochoa

This is a much more ambitious goal than just cloning Twitter or duplicating some of its features. And while Caldwell has beaten many people’s expectations by even getting funded in the first place, it remains to be seen whether enough users and developers will be willing to pay for the service to make it an effective resource — especially since similar efforts to create an open ecosystem for the social web have mostly failed. Are there enough supporters of an open standard to make a difference, or is the social web doomed to be a world of competing proprietary walled gardens?

App.net wants to be a platform, not just an app

Orian Marx, the creator of New York-based startup Siftee, does a good job in a recent post describing the difference between what the alpha version of App.net looks like now and the broader ambitions of Caldwell and his partners. What you see when you go to the site appears to be a very stripped-down version of Twitter, but with far fewer users and features, and that has led many to dismiss it as a short-lived clone — one that will die because it won’t be able to compete with the kind of network effects Twitter has developed (although Caldwell argues network effects can be a negative as well as a positive). As Marx describes it:

“App.net will combine the simplicity of cloud infrastructure with the power of web frameworks to deliver the best platform for developing social web applications.”

In other words, the alpha is more like a test case or prototype of what could be built by using the platform App.net is trying to construct — one that uses open standards such as PubSubHubbub and ActivityStreams and other protocols that make it easy to distribute information through multiple networks, as well as allowing users to find and “follow” other users, and other things that we associated with Twitter or social networking in general. One comparison would be to Amazon Web Services, which is a collection of tools like the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 that developers and companies can use to build services on top of.

Another way of thinking about what App.net is trying to do is to think about what email used to look like, or (for those who aren’t quite as old) what instant messaging used to be like. There were competing platforms and competing standards, and nothing like an open API or any of the other things we associate with allowing different services to exchange information. Users of CompuServe Mail couldn’t easily send mail to other mail-hosting services, and later on users of ICQ or AOL’s Instant Messenger couldn’t easily chat with users of other competing platforms such as Microsoft’s MSN or Google’s GChat.

As Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures notes in a recent post about the potential benefits of App.net, what the social web lacks is a way of tying together various standards and protocols that allow anyone to integrate or exchange information easily with any other similar service — in the same way that anyone can send email to anyone else on the internet:

“It would a huge benefit to society if we can get with social networking to where we are with email today: it is fundamentally decentralized with nobody controlling who can email whom about what, anyone can use email essentially for free, there are opensource and commercial implementations available and third parties are offering value added services.”

Will the promise of an open platform be enough?

While Twitter has become a powerful information-publishing system and a kind of real-time newswire, it is still a private corporation with its own commercial interests, and as it expands its attempts to control more of its network — in order to monetize it more effectively — it is clamping down on the use of its API in ways that have caused friction with both developers and users. Much of the impetus for Caldwell’s project came from that dissatisfaction, and the feeling that Twitter at some point gave up on its desire to be an information utility and chose to become an advertising-based media entity instead. As one App.net supporter put it:

“[App.net] provides a solid API platform that is less likely to be yanked out from under our feet when the VCs get antsy and want to see a profit or acquisition.”

There have been other efforts to create a kind of open platform for the social web, however, and most have not ended well: one was an attempt to create a public standard for social connections called OpenSocial, which was driven by Google but designed to be an open protocol. Although the project still exists, it made very little headway, and was more or less doomed when Google recently killed off its Social Graph API. Rightly or wrongly, the project was seen as Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook — but its efforts have since been diverted to promoting its own Google+ network (which ironically still doesn’t have a fully open API of its own).

In some ways, Caldwell’s App.net also has similarities to FriendFeed, the federated social network that former Google staffers Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit (one of the original developers of Gmail) created in 2007, which allowed users to pull in messages and updates from multiple networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. FriendFeed was eventually acquired by Facebook in 2009 for $48 million and Taylor became the company’s chief operating technology officer and one of the architects of its market-dominating “open graph platform.”

Will App.net ultimately wind up on the scrap heap along with other attempts to create an open social ecosystem, a victim of the market power of incumbents like Facebook and Twitter and/or the ambivalence of users? Or will it gain enough support to become a real alternative to the walled gardens that currently make up the social web?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and See-ming Lee

There’s been a lot written recently about Twitter and the choices it seems to be making about the future of the network, although the exact nature of those choices remains shrouded in mystery. Some say Twitter made the wrong choice when it decided to focus on advertising as a business model, rather than expanding its status as an open platform for others to build on, while others argue that doing this was the only possible move the company could make if it wanted to build a business. In many ways, this dilemma is the same one that confronts many media companies (which isn’t surprising, since we have argued that Twitter effectively is one) — namely, how much should you be a platform, and how much should you be a destination?

As entrepeneur Dalton Caldwell has noted, at some point during the past two years Twitter made a deliberate decision to de-emphasize its nature as a platform with a wide-open API that allowed developers to add functionality to the service. It’s fascinating to look now at a post that now-CEO Dick Costolo wrote on the Twitter blog in 2010, in which he describes what appears to be a very different future from the one Twitter has pursued — one in which a new feature called “Annotations” would allow the network to function as a real-time information utility, which other services could build into their offerings:

We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform.

Twitter chose advertising over being a platform

Although Twitter has implemented some added functions that allow it to offer things like the new “expanded tweets” feature it is currently rolling out, Annotations as it was originally described never really came to be. Instead, the company chose to focus all of its efforts on becoming an advertising platform, with features such as “Promoted Tweets” and “Promoted Trends,” and partnerships with large brands and media players like Coca-Cola and MTV. And the more it has focused on advertising, the more it has confronted the kinds of challenges that media companies of all kinds are confronting.

It’s not just advertising as a business model that is the central challenge for Twitter, however, as it is for other traditional media players like the New York Times. It’s the inherent tension between the two potential futures that Caldwell mentions in his post: the one in which Twitter is an open platform with a robust API that allows other players of all kinds to build on top of the network — turning it into a sort of real-time news and information distribution utility or plumbing provider — and the one where the company becomes a media player in its own right, controlling the access to that information as tightly as possible, and monetizing the attention around that information via advertising.

The New York Times has experimented with open APIs, which give outside developers access to its data for use in third-party services or features, and so have a number of other newspapers and media companies such as USA Today and National Public Radio. But the traditional media player that has taken this idea the furthest is The Guardian newspaper in Britain (see disclosure below) — which launched an “open platform” project in 2010, offering all of its data to outside developers through an API. Doing this has been a core part of Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger’s concept of “open journalism.”

Can a media company survive as an open platform?

In a nutshell, the Guardian‘s open platform project offers developers and third-party services full access to the newspaper’s stories and other data, and they can pay for that access in one of two ways: they can either pay a licensing fee for the data, or they can allow the Guardian to insert advertising into the stream of content that they get. This is very similar to the vision of Twitter’s future that entrepreneur Nova Spivack detailed after Twitter gave its warning, one which would involve the service either charging users and services directly for access to the “firehose” of data from the network, or monetizing it by inserting ads into the feed.

Twitter may not create content itself, but the recent moves it has made — whether it’s the launch of “curation” services based on its acquisition of Summify, or the creation of new editorial services built around experiences like the recent NASCAR race, or the focus on new features like “expanded tweets” — are driven by the same impulse as anything the New York Times or any other media company does: that is, a desire to commandeer (and/or seduce) the attention of users and direct them to the company’s platform, whether that’s a printed newspaper or a website like Twitter.com. And the fundamental purpose of doing this is to monetize that attention by selling it to advertisers.

Is it possible for a media entity to simultaneously be an open platform and a destination? The Guardian has had some success with its open platform, but how much isn’t really known, and it certainly isn’t enough to stop the massive financial losses the paper is undergoing — which isn’t going to fill a company like Twitter with confidence, especially when it is trying to justify an almost $10-billion valuation. And so the network’s future looks more and more like that of a traditional media entity, chasing the same eyeballs that everyone from Facebook to Google are also pursuing.

Disclosure: Guardian News and Media Ltd., the parent company of the Guardian newspaper, is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Fabio Venni and jphilipg