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Don't forget about Twitter's API and liberal usage policy that made the plethora of clients and mashups possible -- I think this accelerated their growth more t

• ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
  This is a far better point. Twitter happened along in that magical time of AJAX when everyone was willing to share their data because we all talked about how everything should be free and open. Then the social media companies realized that this was a gigantic mistake, and started to seal everything up. How could they be expected to make their billions when their services were so open that they were essentially becoming abstracted protocols for third party apps? The opportunity to sell advertising and personal data is far greater when what you have is closed. I understand why they did it; I just hate that they did. It always felt like a massive bait and switch and I'm betting that Facebook and Twitter aren't going to be the last ones that do this.
• freshyill 12y ago
  You're correct. Smartphone usage growth basically coincides with Twitter's growth, and early Twitter apps had far fewer constraints. Twitterrific was a jailbreak app before Apple even launched the App Store. Did Twitter even have an official iOS app before they bought Tweetie? That seemed like it happened around the time of the first big API lockdown.