Fred Wilson calls time on the Twitter Echosystem?

Wednesday, April 7. 2010

Fred Wilson calls time on the Twitter Echosystem?

Interesting post on AVC:

I got out of college in the early 80s when the desktop revolution was upon us. A bunch of my friends from MIT were piling into startups in Cambridge building products on top of this new desktop computing platform. One of them was a company called General Computer that made external hard drives for the original Macintosh, which you might recall came with only a floppy drive. General Computer did fantastic for a while but its business eventually faded away as Apple filled in the holes in the Macintosh product.

Contrast that with Lotus, another Cambridge company that built something entirely new on top of the desktop platform. Or Aldus, who started the desktop publishing business that "saved Mac" as my friend points out.

And then a bit later.....

Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. It is the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s. Some of the most popular third party services on Twitter are like that. Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience. Note to all prospective Tweetxxxx platform funders. Be sure to check if your proposed fundee is a Lotus, not a Floppy

Fred is really just repeating what Tim O'Reilly said in Berlin18 months year ago, ie build real stuff:

I believe we are entering a new phase now. Twitter is a global platform, the 33rd largest in the world according to Comscore, with almost 70mm uvs worldwide in February. It is a large company now with the resources to service the ecosystem in ways it never could before. It's hosting its first developers conference, Chirp, in San Francisco next week. And so it's time for Twitter and its developer ecosystem to work together to create entirely new things that will shape the Internet in the coming years. I'm excited to see it happen.

That's about as clear as it gets.....

Posted by Alan Patrick in Web Services / Cloud Computing at 22:40 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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