To echo Ryan B.'s point earlier, I don't think people are confused about Twitter needing to make money. On the contrary, I think it's well-known and accepted that they need to do so in order to keep their service running. However, the way they've gone about it is both a bit confusing and counter to what made them a popular service in the first place. Thinly-veiled threats directed at their developer community, turning off the ability to find friends on other networks... I'm not sure how anything they're doing besides creating an advertising network is in the interest of turning a profit.

You could argue that sticking a knife in 3rd party clients is a push toward profitability, but many are arguing it's short-sighted and unnecessary.

I agree w/ Cap that Twitter's motivations are especially confusing here. I certainly recognize that Twitter desperately needs to make some real money. And I recognize that they need to have certain controls over their API to facilitate that. If, for example, tweetbot started serving the tweet stream without ads and they got cut off for that it would be perfectly understandable.

But that's not what is happening here. Is twitter concerned that the growth of Tumblr will negatively impact the time that people spend on Twitter and they hope that cutting of Tumblr's access to the friend graph will somehow help them in this competition? That's a lot of guesses to string together but it's all I've got right now.

First, "they have to make money" is a ridiculous defense for any company, ever. It could apply to polluting our environment, making a shoddy product, or pissing off their customers.

Secondly, Twitter had to make money four years ago. That fact hasn't changed. Their approach changed, not the facts on the ground.
Third, they made over $100 million last year. No one forced them to take money at a stratospheric valuation. No one forced them to hire a thousand people. They made conscious decisions that necessitated making more money than they could with the path they were on at the time. Those decisions were their choice.

Finally, it strikes me as insanely ill-timed to ask a favor of a company to implement a new feature of yours - in this case, cards - and then only a couple months later, stab 'em in the back by taking back something you were giving to them. The order of events is just silly - would everyone have implemented cards for twitter - and they needed wide acceptance - if they knew they were going to do this right afterwards?

I feel like we're all seeing the effects of an organization in transition - transition between being built around personality and, now, a business model. I think their social graph is probably worth a lot of money. Monetizing it might make sense. Killing off ecosystem good-will because it's valuable and you're not making money off of it yet doesn't make sense.

There are enough voices of reason inside the Twitter org that this feels misguided - like lawyers who attack without checking with the bosses. Will they arrive at consistent positions towards the developer community? Hard to tell right now.

Aaron, I think that's dead on. What's interesting is that Twitter has been making these misguided/inconsistent moves for awhile now. New Twitter, New New Twitter. Launch the Mac App and then let it fester. Threaten to pull the plug on 3rd party apps (years ago), then not doing it. Threaten again recently under the umbrella of "we value a consistent UX," when their platform experiences are anything but consistent.

There's something schizophrenic about it. I think that's what makes me more nervous than anything else.

Yeah, it has me concerned. In the past, I've smiled and politely (and quietly) absorbed all sorts of ecosystem anomalies that I attributed to a company (full of my friends) trying to find its path. Every time something like this happens, I've rationalized it as part of a learning process for them...but it doesn't seem to be getting better.

Frankly, I was surprised the 1.1 API didn't cut off REST access altogether. Based off of what I'd seen from their actions, it seemed like the next rational step. That they didn't says to me that there's enormous internal tension (even in a post Ev/Biz world) about the future of the company and its relationship to the developer world.

I had a very strong feeling of anger after hearing about Twitter blocking the "find friends" feature in Instagram and Tumblr. But when I sat down to write about it, my opinion changed.

It's still kind of a dick move, but when you think about their options, it makes sense to me. Read more here: dcurt.is

Perhaps the question this all boils down to: can Twitter now survive without an ecosystem of applications that consumers use? Is the Twitter experience enough?

Dustin's last paragraph sums it up for me (hopefully quoting is ok since it's linked above?):

"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."

With each overly-aggressive, anti-competitive move they make, Twitter is shortening their lifespan. Sure, in the short-term maybe it will bring in more cash, but I think we all want Twitter to be around for the long-term.

Twitter bought their search feature from a third-party. They bought their main desktop and mobile clients from a third-party. The @ and # were community inventions. Their logo was a twist on Twitterific's icon.

So many of the things that are "Twitter" weren't invented by Twitter, but by third-party developers.

Even if you take turning off Instagram and Tumblr's access to "find friends" as a moral and just imperative, it was just so botched. They have been completely tone deaf to public opinion. And again: asking for the favor of cards implementation, waiting for people to implement it, and THEN turning off find friends is either dickish or incompetent. Be up front about it.

Oh, and retweets. The community invented retweets with RT: long (long!) before it became a proper feature.

Rick, what do you think they should have done differently, other than now waiting for the Cards integration? I can't think of an elegant way to drop the news.

with regards to cards and "find friends" think they should have said, when asking people to implement cards, what the situation was: that they might be pulling find friends soon. Let people make that choice. If the decision was made after, they should have acknowledged it and perhaps delayed things for a while because of the favor.

On the PR front, there's a whole host of things they should have done differently. Sippy's post wasn't bad, it was pretty good, if you understood tech. There should have been a commensurate public blog post. Even right now, they should be doing SOMETHING on the PR front.