In the beginning there was the Tweet, entrepreneurs saw the Tweet and said it was good.

And the good lord Evan looked down and said, “I shall give them an API with access to the juicy data”.  And the entrepreneurs had the ideas and gave them to the developers.  Developers created things, some good and some not favourable in the eyes of Evan.

The users did join and said, “what do we do with this?” and then left. Then in prodigal fashion didst returneth to the tweet and lo it did beareth fruit.  

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The API maketh the product but only to a point.  There is always one thing to keep in mind, it won’t last forever.  The gestation period for a startup is what they give away and gain adoption of users.  The free API tools, though throttled, are great for gaining user and developer adoption.  This does produce a landscape of apps and websites, so useful and some not.  Rest assured that these things are not going unnoticed.  

Twitter needed their own mobile client, why go to the bother, get someone else’s.

I always thought it was shortsighted on developers to sit there and thing this is there income stream.  To put total dependency on one provider is always a short lived and dangerous move.  Obviously there’s only one Twitter API so you’re at the mercy of it.  

Ultimately the aim is to produce the content so you have control of it.  It seems we’ve forgot that a bit over the years, hopefully that’ll come around a bit.

Just think what could happen to your products when someone turns the tap off, how thirsty are you going to get?  Rest assured that one day the Facebook will tighten the hose eventually.