Some developers are afraid Twitter is directly competing with them with its acquisitions of tools that served functions that have traditionally been provided by third party developers.
The conversation hit a fever pitch when Twitter announced that it has purchased Atebits, the developer of the very popular Twitter iPhone OS and Mac OS app Tweetie. News also recently broke that Twitter worked with Research in Motion to launch a Twitter app for BlackBerry smartphones. Tweetie will be renamed "Twitter for iPhone," and the BlackBerry app was presented with language that established it as Twitter's official app.
Developers fear that these moves could relegate their labors of love to secondary status in Twitter users' eyes, and that the company may shift some its focus to in-house development, leaving them behind the curve where new features are concerned.
In the note, Sarver reaches out to the development community and says that it was a mistake to pitch the BlackBerry app as an "official" one, but re-iterated the company's commitment to making sure that it's serving an app on Apple's App Store that users can easily identify. He said:
When we dug in a little bit we realized that it was causing massive confusion among user's who had an iPhone and were looking to use Twitter for the first time. They would head to the App Store, search for Twitter and would see results that included a lot of apps that had nothing to do with Twitter and a few that did, but a new user wouldn't find what they were looking for and give up. That is a lost user for all of us.
The argument is that it's better for everyone in the ecosystem — including third-party developers — to make it easier for would-be Twitter users to join the scene. The conversation will continue at the Chirp conference for Twitter developers in San Francisco later this week.