The New Reality of the Twitter Ecosystem: Should you develop Twitter apps? via Gigaom

The House Always Wins
I’ve remained fairly ambivalent through this whole controversy — mostly because the gray in my hair tells me that the economic interests of platform owners and the people who develop for them are almost never in sync. So from my perspective, those who invest in single-platform companies deserve their fate. I was equally hard on those that focused their investments solely on the Facebook platform, too.
Whether it’s Google, Apple, Intel, Microsoft or even Sony (Playstation), platform owners almost always end up going home with 60-70 percent of the total profits. From that perspective, what Twitter is doing isn’t so out of step — even though Twitter and its ecosystem are nowhere close to being a profit machine.

Interesting discussion, how 3rd party developers are p..ed by Twitter developing features on its own not taking care of partner solutions. Guys: This is not new at all. This has happened dozen times before. Remember Microsoft with Windows? First they supported partners to develop hundreds of solutions to make their platform relevant, dominant, big. Then they took over more and more pieces of the cake … Why should Twitter be different? Make your money in short time or develop for multiple platforms. The only way to go and stay independant. Don’t bed all your $’s on one vendor. You will get … off.