Their move motivates the discussion of the merits of the premise that developers really are a commodity, and what is important and fundamental is the ecosystem.

Their move motivates the discussion of the merits of the premise that developers really are a commodity, and what is important and fundamental is the ecosystem. Developing facebook apps is a nightmare of constantly having to hit a moving target, and constantly updating and maintaining old code. I've left and abandoned that area, but companies like zynga clearly have stayed and have even begun breaking out of that ecosystem. This is not just an online or social media phenomenon but also extends to brick and mortar stores, malls, mail order catalogs, etc. I feel like there are three groups of people, the people that have always realized that it's twitter's prerogative to act in it's own economic best interest and never trusted the idea of building a business on that, the second group that knows that to be true, but thought 'oh twitter is an exception' and the third that simply heard twitter's initial press releases that 'we don't care about monetization' and we're different. Premise: Everyone's going to target the ecosystem that has people on it, before it was search and look at all of the SEO spam, currently it's twitter and facebook, and the goal is to engage users via that customer acquisition platform, and eventually build your own community and continue the cycle.