The problem is, this isn't success. Everyone (users, app developers and twitter itself) has been enjoying a free ride for the last x years, courtesy of investment money. It's been one big successful party... except for the fact it's been anything but for the investors. And when it comes to judging a company's success, the latter is the only kind that matters.

Taken in that light, it's hard to feel sorry for those who were caught out when the music stopped and the party was over. The investors are free to take the company in whatever direction they like in pursuit of real success (i.e. turning a profit) and if that means strangling the third party eco system, then so be it. Whether or not that's a good idea (I'm not sure it is) is irrelevant. It's their call to make.

I'm so glad we agree on this. Users indeed do not care about technologies or APIs.

They care about great experiences.

Twitter does not excel at great experiences. If they did, third party clients would not have to exist.

Since they do, 23% of Twitter users choose to consume the network via superior-to-them, third-party offerings. Twitter has signed the death warrant of those products. Craigslist would be a valid counter-argument had it been initially built on the strength of third-party clients and then killed them. (PadMapper doesn't count, before you bring it up. It came to craigslist after dominance, not before.)

Twitter, on the other hand, has two native clients that began their very lives as third-party products.

We'll see. Maybe Twitter will be just fine after taking their most engaged users and sending them elsewhere.

Or maybe the users will follow their tech-savvy friends to a better experience, which again, isn't a hard category to trounce Twitter in.

Startups have limited resources. If you devote them to solving tomorrow's problems then you'll be beaten by someone who devotes their resources to solving today's problems.

No, I disagree on this. This is not true. Remember, the developers wouldn't even care about developing for this platform if it wasn't big in the first place. Developers didn't make it big. Twitter became big, and developers came flocking in.

Implying that Twitter reached success under Rails, even if it was _not_ the best fit for the problem set.

Dumping Rails when you have won the market is a nice luxury to have, one that most people on HN do not have.

This meant ANY platform where a developer cared to bring out a Twitter client had it, and hence more people could jump in quickly.

Secondly, really creative users made Twitter what it is today with Retweets and Hashtags.

Twitter would be wise to not start an evaporative cooling effect.

Sorry if you've explained it elsewhere (I've not been paying much attention) but can you cite/explain that claim? My experience might be different, but most of the "normal people" I know of that use Twitter use it through the apps for their mobile (eg: iPhone, Blackberry) and they use it because that's the device they use, not because the apps are incredible and make Twitter appealing, the Twitter network is appealing. Based on this wouldn't the correct argument be that making Twitter available to everyone easily is what caused Twitter's mainstream success?

I think you explained the problem yourself: At day 0 Twitter made no sense to users and Twitter had 0 barriers to entry, all you had to do was sign up! How can app.net get over that problem while charging $50? If I'm correct that ease of access/use is what made Twitter mainstream wouldn't that mean you're doing the exact opposite of what made Twitter successful?

I really love the idea and hope it succeeds, but I don't see how you can appeal to anyone outside of the tech circle when charging for access.

How is "having the potential to create a community around it" (and failing) more valuable than catering to the actually existing Twitter community?

fixed that for you ;)

What problem does Twitter solve? (Not a rhetorical question)

Nobody cares about Twitter-the-idea, and that's never what anyone means any more when they use the term. What everyone loves is Twitter-the-platform, which is a huge success.

> This idea will also fail; you can't tell people how to use a service.

Yes, you can. When the site is small, you can manually moderate all submissions, literally telling people how they may use it. After the site grows, the "base" will continue to obey the site's culture. As long as the base has more power (in some metric or another) the site will continue in that direction without further work. (This is basically how HN has been set up.)

Note that this might keep the site small—like HN, and unlike Twitter. But that's still entirely monetizable, especially if you have a much larger viewing population than submitting population.

Twitter's product is great and it didn't need to be as large as Facebook. It shouldn't need to twist itself for the greatest common denominator users who required immediate gratification via algorithmic feeds and short memes.

I'm just saying that it's kind of strange seeing people say so-and-so is doing essential-thing to successful-product completely wrong.

I mean, maybe, just maybe, part of Twitter's success is due to it being so simple. Due to the 140 character limit, due to the lack of features like image uploading, etc. Maybe, just maybe, the ecosystem that has been built around Twitter — largely due to lack of features — actually plays in their favor?

I just don't see how you can be so sure that everything they're doing is wrong, and they're successful in spite of it, rather than successful because of exactly what they are doing.

Classy move, twitter.

So yeah, no surprise that they would blame others for their failings.

Umm. Sorry? Come again? None of these have succeeded? By exactly which metric are you measuring success here?

Please explain exactly how twitter is even as successful as friendfeed let alone facebook.

edit: -1 points for questioning how you're measuring friendfeed and facebook as failures? My how times have changed.

The code may have been bad, thrown together, and not architected correctly, but, if the company was able to get customers and become profitable enough or get funding to hire people to clean it up, they were a success.

The Twitter codebase was a well known clusterfuck, but they got product market fit and were able to survive long enough and become capitalized well enough to rearchitect their system.