{"id":520920,"date":"2010-04-08T18:06:18","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T22:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=111712"},"modified":"2010-04-08T18:06:18","modified_gmt":"2010-04-08T22:06:18","slug":"yes-twitter-will-drink-your-milkshake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/520920","title":{"rendered":"Yes, Twitter Will Drink Your Milkshake"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Twitter investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures may have thought he was just musing aloud about the Twitter ecosystem and whether it has reached an “inflection point” in his recent blog post<\/a>, but it seems as though some third-party app developers took his comments about Twitter features as a thinly-veiled declaration of war. Why? Because the Twitter VC suggested that the social network should have had features such as a URL shortener, a picture-uploading service and other additional services built in, rather than relying on third-party developers to come up with these add-ons later. The implication, according to some observers<\/a>, is that Twitter is going to develop its own versions of these features and squeeze out third-party companies. Programming guru Dave Winer put some of these fears into words in a blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In some ways, Wilson’s post seemed more like a thoughtful exploration of Twitter’s future (which is how I interpreted it<\/a>), but it’s clear that the tension surrounding Twitter and its eventual business model — or models — has risen to the point where even an offhand observation by a VC can cause a flash fire to erupt.<\/p>\n

This isn’t the first time that developers have gotten their knickers in a knot about Twitter and its intentions, however: Twitter developer Alex Payne caused a minor ruckus In February when he mentioned (in a tweet that has since been deleted from his stream), that there were some cool new features coming to the service’s web site and that once people saw them “you might not want to use a third-party client.” TechCrunch wrote a post speculating that this meant Twitter was going after third-party apps<\/a>, and Payne decided to stop blogging in part because he thought his comments had been misconstrued<\/a>. Twitter staffers later tried to smooth the waters at an open house with app developers, video of which is embedded below.<\/p>\n

<\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n