Twitter's development team fiddled a lot with Twitter in 2011. Changing its interface as frequently, if not more so, than their Facebook counterparts. Twitter's team have made significant changes to the way third party applications authenticate with Twitter's servers, and to Twitter's policy on an open Twitter ecosystem. Ryan Sarver's message to developers is clear, Twitter doesn't want to contend with application developers.
"Developers have told us that they'd like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no." (see: TechCrunch)
Twitter needs us on Twitter.com - sponsored tweets are a source of revenue, but 75% of the users Twitter opens its servers to, don't view the ads which help to keep it afloat.
With this feature release, pundits have started to compare Twitter to Google+ and Facebook. The comparison isn't valid. Google "owns" access to Google+ and Facebook ... Facebook doesn't like its friends shaking hands with strangers. At all. Ever. So whilst Twitter has a feature similar to its rivals, it has a unique problem. How does Twitter get 75% of its user base to abandon third party services like Echofon and make use of its interface?
My guess, Twitter shall make it damn near impossible for third party services to emulate Twitter's stream at all. Third party service providers will be forced to fight amongst themselves to create bolt on services. An example of which is Instagram, a social image service which relies heavily on Twitter integration.
In addition, I foresee Twitter acquiring more services this year. Perhaps Twitter will add Tweetbot and Echofon to their stable which already contains Tweetie and most recently TweetDeck. In a play best exemplified by Apple, Twitter may seek to completely rule its ecosystem - letting only those services not in direct competition with their primary platform make use of their API.
Early adopters like IBM have the requisite clout - read money - to rope in DJ Tiesto for their campaigns to draw users in. I wonder how marketers will make use of brand pages for those brands unwilling to fork out the cash required for once off experiences worthy of ditching a third party app and logging in to Twitter?
I cannot wait to get my hands on a brand page, and can only hope that Twitter has integrated an analytics dashboard. Ideally not unlike Google's and Facebook's. Such a service will have me logging in to Twitter on the hour, every hour and may indeed help to save the service.
