Twitter is making what many of us feel to be mistakes with its beloved service. A service with a legacy of robust developer support and user-created community.
But Twitter is not evil. It is not out to get you and it is not making the recent changes it has made to its service out of spite. Twitter is trying to find a way to evolve the company from a single feature into a suite of products that it can use to make money.
I agree almost 100% with Matthew on his article about what’s going at Twitter HQ (you should really read the entire piece). As many other companies had to do, Twitter had to make a choice in order to become really profitable. Of course they’re a business and the financial side of the story is as important as their users for them.
Unfortunately these choices are not always easy to make and initially are going to hurt the community a bit. But let’s be honest: the number of “power users” on Twitter is incredibly smaller compared to the total number of active users who are not really going to notice any real difference in the service as long as it is free. We are going to complain of course, but since we don’t pay for this service, we can complain just until a certain point before becoming simply annoying.
Developers are the ones that are going to be really hurt by the new direction taken by Twitter: many business will have difficulties while trying to keep going but Twitter still is a private company and they can do whatever they want as long as they are able to make money for their investor.
That said, I’m incredibly sad for what’s going on, because I truly believe that Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool which allow us to have great conversations and make great discoveries. We’ll see how it goes, but I think that until Twitter will remain a privately owned company there’s not much we can do to change things around.