On Wednesday, Union Square Ventures founder and Twitter venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote on his blog that Twitter has reached an inflection point, a post that was widely seen as threatening to third-party developers of applications that live on top of the Twitter platform. Would Twitter develop it’s own photo sharing capabilities or desktop application putting TwitPic and TweetDeck respectively out to pasture?
It wasn’t the first time someone related to Twitter had freaked out third-party developers. In February, Twitter engineer Alex Payne tweeted about some upcoming features, causing a stir. This time was different.
This time Twitter encroached on territory it had previously left all to third-party developers by buying iPhone app Tweetie, and putting it’s official stamp on the RIM’s Blackberry Twitter app.
For Twitter, having official mobile apps makes sense, especially for holding on to new users who might find using a third-party app confusing. Wilson explained:
When you talk to a new user, they want to know how to post a photo to Twitter, they want to know “what is this bit.ly thing?”, they want to know how to get Twitter on their iPhone. Names like Summize, Twitpic, Tweetie make no sense to them. Of course, without Summize, Twitpic, and Tweetie we would not have the Twitter we have today. They and many other third party products and services filled out the holes in the Twitter product and made it work better.
But what about all those other developers of iPhone and Blackberry Twitter clients? Can they compete with the anointed apps? Will they even want to? As Wilson pointed out, Twitter got where it is by letting its community innovate.
It remains to be seen if other iPhone and Blackberry Twitter apps will now die off, but the real risk here is chilling innovation in the rest of Twitter ecosystem. If you think you can build a better photo-sharing service than TwitPic, you might not bother because of the possibility Twitter will buy TwitPic before you get your service launched.
Mobile, however, is part and parcel to Twitter, and they’re smart to want to control it; Twitter isn’t going to be interested in competing with every service that runs on their platform.
On Wednesday, Twitter is hosting its first developer conference called Chirp, and we’ll likely hear more about what Twitter plans for itself. In a year there might be far fewer choice for Twitter apps on iPhone and Blackberry, but I suspect most of won’t care and we’ll look back at this week as nothing more than a growing pain.