Why Twitter Should Stay Out of the App Business

waderoush writes "Twitter has come out with some impressive new tools this month — the Twitter app for iPhone/iPad on September 1, and the overhauled Twitter website, or #NewTwitter, this week. But Twitter is late to its own party, Xconomy argues today. #NewTwitter still lacks basics like photo uploading and URL shortening, and apps built by third-party developers like TweetDeck and Flipboard continue to provide more compelling ways to explore the information in a Twitter stream. While Twitter may finally be 'getting focused' on ways to achieve mass market growth, as former Twitter platform manager Alex Payne wrote this week, the company will have a hard time competing with its own developer community — and might do better instead to acknowledge, and focus on, the service's growing role as a general Internet utility."

Comments

Re:Hurt their own developers

[MrEricSir]

Twitter needs to focus on their core service. It frequently goes offline, like many social services did when their growth was faster than expected (Friendster, LiveJournal, etc.)

The lessons of other social networks should be a clue that focusing on infrastructure stability needs to be a priority. People will get used to a crappy interface -- just look at MySpace -- but will not put up with unstable service for long.