In England in 16th century King Henry VIII brought about a reformation of the church in England separating it from the authority of the Catholic Pope in Rome. In Henry's case this was mostly about getting his way with Anne Boleyn and siring an heir but it formed part of a much wider rebellion against the absolute power of the Papacy.
500 years on there is a modern reformation brewing - this time against the microblogging service Twitter - and while the analogy may seem trite the numbers involved suggest the impact of this reformation may prove to have a similar impact.
Twitter's Authority
Twitter's ubiquity is profound. With a 140,000,000 subscribers to its service it is the far and away the leading social network for the sharing and re-sharing of information and it is Twitter - not Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn - which is helping to fan the flames of political upheaval across the world. ( Source: AllTwitter )
It is fast, efficient, very mobile and entirely free at the point of use and it's functionality and simple programming interface - driven by it's vocal early-adopters - has allowed it to infiltrate every aspect of many people's lives; their desktops, phones and even their tv-screens.
The role of developers in Twitter's meteoric rise
Twitter is very much more that just a website. In 2007 it's co-founder Biz Stone told ReadWriteWeb that it was its API - a simple programmer's interface to the platform - that was "arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing [they had ever] done with Twitter." He went on to confirm that this API drove "easily 10 times more traffic than the website".
So far beyond having a good idea or a clever website it was in fact the ability for outside developers to build on top of Twitter that drove its success. Twitter became an ecosystem. Twitter is now, ultimately, just an API - a message exchange platform - and it's various official channels - twitter.com, TweetDeck and the Official Twitter phone and desktop apps - are all simply clients of this API.
Why the Schism
Twitter dropped a bomb. Or more accurately it is beginning to publicly discuss that it's building a bomb.
In March this year Twitter turned 6 and according to observers while it's ecosystem is flourishing Twitter itself is still trying to figure out how to make enough money to survive.
In June, following the announcement of a new "Twitter Cards" device - designed to place more content within the stream - Twitter fired a warning shot.
In an article entitled Delivering a consistent Twitter Experience Michael Sippey talks about allowing developers to "build engaging experiences into Twitter".
But this is all good right?
Twitter's drive to develop its user experience and to make the service more consistent could be seen as a good thing. But the problem lies in the way that Twitter has historically treated it's developers and API partners. Most of the official API clients ( the mobile phone apps, TweetDeck, even the email-service we now all see in our inbox ) are the result of Twitter buying up the API development ideas that it likes.
The concern is that when it doesn't like an idea, where the developer's tool is directly competitive to a Twitter acquisition or - now - where the idea simply doesn't fit with Twitter's ever changing ideas about what it wants to become then Twitter has absolute authority to excommunicate that application or, perhaps more subtly, reimplement the idea itself.
Will Twitter behave badly?
TweetDeck, Tweetie and others were lucky enough (perhaps) to be bought but Twitter's recent borrowing of StockTweets' clickable $cashtags is proof that Twitter has no qualms about stealing others' ideas an it's recent splits from LinkedIn & Instagram this year and from Google last year demonstrate that it's taking control of it's ecosystem.
Twitter's new "Cards" idea is significant then for two reasons:
First, judging by the platform's early adopters, it is squarely aimed at building tighter relationships with big media players. These partners wield a lot of power (explicitly or implicitly) as demonstrated by the recent debacle involving a reporter apparently banned for criticising NBC's Olympics coverage.
Secondly that it seems to be a move to transfer use of Twitter into the 'official' twitter applications both by providing the types of complex in-stream functionality that the cards may become and by legitimising the argument that simpler API clients that don't support these new functions should be closed down because they no longer comply with Twitter's developing standards.
Together these arguments are significant because ultimately Twitter needs to make money to survive. It seems that by monetizing the flow of rich content within the stream from big media partners Twitter is finding alternatives and extensions to its sponsored Tweet advertising model.
The greater significant a source of revenue this rich-stream platform becomes the more protective Twitter will need to become about who can use it and how its used.
If media partners are backing the move to richer expanded Tweets they will not want to see a large portion of the extra experience being lost on popular platforms which don't support Twitter Cards.
The Twitter Reformation
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
On July 13th 2012 Dalton Caldwell nailed his petition to the church door (metaphorically of course) announcing APP.NET - a microblogging service, initially very similar to Twitter, built with developers and users in mind and particularly not built for advertisers.
Dalton claims that a nominal subscription service can survive and if 140,000,000 Twitter users can be convinced then that would seem to be true. Certainly in the past month alone almost 5,000 developers (myself included) have been happy enough to pony up a few hundred dollars to kickstart the project raising almost $350,000.
Twitter is to big to fail? No? Why?
The elephantine question in the room: "Twitter is too big to fail?" ... well actually it's not.
Why? Because even now, years on from Biz Stones original comments about the Twitter API's dominance over Twitter's traffic, Twitter simply remains a conduit for discussion that can be switched out. That the proportion of developer's API calls has been falling over the years is probably far more to do with the fact that Twitter has bought the big API users like TweetDeck & Tweetie.
There are too many developers like me who have invested our lives (and our life savings) into Twitter related projects ( shameless plug for twiDAQ right here ) in the honest belief that Twitter would uphold it's open relationship with us. Of course I hope it continues to do so.
But if the worst happens then then the task of moving twiDAQ to use APP.NET's data-feeds to drive our game's metaphors would be a pretty easy one. For the myriad of alternative mobile & desktop client apps the same will be true and if APP.NET does gain some traction then some bright spark somewhere will very quickly build the service that unifies the two APIs.
So there is an added incentive for people like me and people like you to support APP.NET. First of course everyone likes an underdog but moreover the huge numbers (millions) of developers who have built against the Twitter API will value competition in this market place and if APP.NET get their developer relations right ( which it seems they are doing ) then we may end up favouring the underdog.
Users? Users will follow where their apps take them as much as where their friends are.
What does the future hold?
Twitter has recently and repeatedly demonstrated by its incredibly heavy handedness with reporters, partners and developers that a monopolistic or monolithic microblogging infrastructure cannot be trusted to act solely in the interests of its users. APP.NET suggests that by having a fundamentally different business model it will have the freedom to behave better.
In the future though I see a shift to an entirely open and - critically - a distributed social messaging service.
The person who develops that will probably never see a penny from his or her invention but the developer that truly liberates interpersonal communication will join not just the likes of Linus Torvalds and Tim Berners-Lee in the history books but possibly Martin Luther and William Tyndale too.
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