Marco Arment has a great piece about the whole Twitter xAuth/OAuth thing. This blog is hardly the place to describe the technical issues, but at a high level Twitter is making a change that is going to require a bunch of app developers to jump through hoops in a very short time frame. The app developers are pissed. But Marco (developer of Instapaper and Tumblr) plays the devil’s advocate:
Twitter can do whatever they want.
It’s the simple, brutal truth. Twitter must do what’s best for Twitter. They owe us nothing.
It’s not a public good. It’s not a right. It’s a private, entirely centralized service with no meaningful competition and a massive network-effect barrier to competitive entry. Twitter has all of the power in its relationship with users and developers.
I’ve always believed that business is about the very simple value proposition of the quid pro quo, literally “this for that.” An equal exchange of goods makes for two happy counter parties. Mostly to show off my amazing Latin skills, it was my go to phrase when we launched HotWired back in the early 90’s in the face of criticism that you couldn’t/shouldn’t put advertising on the internet. Our trade was that we were creating all sorts of original content for the new medium of the web and that it was fair to ask our readers to accept advertising in exchange. Needless to say, it worked.
This phrase has been about as close to religion to me as anything and was (not surprisingly) one of the reasons I chose it for the name of this site as well. When a company gives something away for free, it is requesting your attention back in exchange. While not charging may lower the “ask” in return, you still have to give people something they want and plenty of free sites have failed as a result.
Which brings me back to Marco’s post and my complete agreement with his position. Twitter can do whatever it wants, change whatever technical standard it uses and force whatever discipline it wants on its ecosystem. Right now, Twitter has a product that everyone wants to use — in fact, I would argue that for five years the company has given far more than it has received. Twitter is now spending against that deficit and while that might piss people off, it won’t make them leave. Does Twitter have infinite “quid” to spend? Of course, not... no one does and eventually their trade will even out. But until that time, either quit complaining or go build your own sine qua non.