The other day Ryan Sarver pushed a note on behalf of Twitter to the Twitter Development Talk Google group. The missive goes on to outline the reasons that Twitter wishes to limit third party clients from participating in the Twitter ecosystem. My kneejerk reaction, like most early Twitter adopters, is that this is a short sighted, premature money grab. It also is a further breach of trust amongst the developers who have worked to expand the reach of Twitter since the very beginning. Obviously all of those are true, but I am more concerned about a few things that I feel are getting lost in the mix. From my perspective it is pretty clear that the sort of service that Twitter provides presents a high value to society. Whether with or without Twitter, the ability to personally broadcast messages to the public is a feature that a growing group of people do not want to do without and are better off having.
Before we go any further I am compelled to draw your attention to a bit of head tilting hypocricy. You know, my Ma grew up in and eventually escaped from Communist Russia, aka. The Swirling Pool of Dreck. Her stories and the fact that because she escaped I am a freedom loving American (not that Americans have a lock on loving freedom) have endowed me with a finely tuned bullshit/authoritarian radar. When I read things like
"We’ve grown from 48 million to 140 million tweets a day"
and
"According to our data, 90% of active Twitter users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis"
juxtaposed with
"our user research shows that consumers continue to be confused by the different ways that a fractured landscape of third-party Twitter clients display tweets and let users interact with core Twitter functions"
resulting in
"If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service."
my bullshit warning starts dinging. Well, like, which one is it? Are you wildly successful or are your users having trouble figuring out how to tweet. And who are these "consumers" who can't figure this stuff out? My father has a hard time with email but you don't see me bitching at GMail to fix their "client app."
In toto, with one fell swoop this latest policy proclamation has, for all intents and purposes, killed off innovation in the client space, aka. pwned. What if AT&T said that if you wanted to make phone calls you needed to use their phones the way they want you to use them. Oh wait, they tried that. Had AT&T prevailed perhaps we would forever be saddled with the rotary phone of yore. Now, Twitter is no AT&T and 140 character tweets are no phone calls. Yet. Twitter is fast becoming an important part of modern day communication. As it stands, governments are using twitter to communicate with citizens. I can tell you that 311nyc and nycasp are quite valuable to me. It was the legion of third party developers that created the compelling and broad reaching applications that enabled people to "dial in" to this new medium. Which future flavor of third party applications will Twitter deem "core" to their business? Does Twitter have a lock on innovation? By definition, the vast majority of the smartest, most innovative people in the world do not work for Twitter. Killing the communal comity as Twitter has is, in my humble opinion, an exchange of relevance for irreverence.
All this which-client-should-I-use nonsense aside, lets get to the meat of my beef with Twitter. The most glarring affront to this nascent method of communication that this policy declaration has enabled is that Twitter itself now becomes a monoculture ever more easily censored, metered and controlled. As we have seen repeatedly, those in power wish to limit communication. One of the most impressive long lasting technological achievments that Twitter popularized is the concept of third party proxying or rebroadcasting of data. This is not a new concept but I think the way that Twitter employed it is one of the largest uses of the method in an end user application. Instead of having to directly interact with http://twitter.com one could use an intermediary to interact with the same data. In order for a beligerent government to censor Twitter they would need to block Twitter and all third party access points into the system. Obviously, it is far more difficult to block all third parties than it is to block a single provider. And I think it has been the case that Twitter has proven to be incredibly resilient in the face of direct opposition precisely because of their convivence with third party developers. Further, I think it is this exact method of proxying, rebroadcasting and relaying data that will play a major role in circumventing censorship in the future.
At the end of the day, Twitter doesn't need to do anything other than what is best for themselves. I submit that this move is ultimately not in their best interest. I know it has stoked the ire of many in the technology space (raises hand). Many of whom have the knowhow to do something about it. And a few who may have the brass to put together a compeling alternative. If Twitter wants to be bigger, have more users, be more influential and interwoven into peoples lives they will inevitably need to give up more control and be more open or face competition or worse, perhaps government regulation? But in the end, Twitters' lasting impression on civilization will be that it validated the model of the service they pioneered. It is my opinion that if Twitter continues to close ranks, become more closed than open, we will see compeling alternatives that will ultimately displace Twitter as the only game in town when it comes to broadcasting short missives.
This has been a Public Service Announcement. Carry on.