This week saw some interesting news that Twitter is looking to get developers to stop building Twitter clients in an effort to better control how users access their platform. The story was covered on Ars Technica: Twitter tells third-party devs to stop making Twitter client apps
It got me thinking a bit about Twitter and Facebook, and where these two platforms hoping to go. It seems clear, especially in the case of Facebook, becoming a full serving internet based platforms is the goal. A social operating system in the cloud that offers a variety of services. Facebook is well underway, and I believe Twitter will inevitably follow.
It’s going to be an interesting year to see what Twitter does this year. I think integrating one of these outside photo services (Twitpic) is definitely going to happen this year. One thing is for sure, this announcement that newly developed apps will be frowned upon shows a clear intent on control the entire experience and ensure that add revenue and services are passing through the company.
On a semi-related note the idea of Facebook as fully developed platform that provides services is the exact reason why I don’t think Android’s eventual dominance of market share will have the same effects as Microsoft’s Windows dominance did. In a couple of years you could see users doing everything through a Facebook platform. E-Mail, Chat, renting movies, and so on. With Android being a free license, you could see a scenario where they don’t make profits because people are using alternate web platforms instead of those offered by Google.
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