Black Widow | Dustin Curtis
The solution Twitter has taken is to barricade the walled garden, keep the valuable tweet data inside Twitter, and remove all incentives for people to move to other, similar platforms.
The problem with this solution is that Twitter was built on the backs of the very developers it is now blocking. It now expects those developers to continue supporting Twitter by syndicating content into its platform, but it no longer wants to provide any value to developers in return. This is an extremely dangerous position because it creates resentment in the minds of the people most likely to influence the future. When the disruptive competitor comes along – when, not if – who are the developers going to side with? And since Twitter has little value outside of its graph and contains only shortly-lived, ephemeral content, where the developers go, the users will follow.
