Twitter’s openness led to a flood of 70,000 applications that helped propel the the microblogging service to unfathomable success, but now that sea of opportunity appears to be drying up quickly.

It’s a fear that has probably crossed the mind of every application developer outside Twitter: what if the company decides to to build the same features in house? In her recent nytimes.com article, “Tensions Rise for Twitter and App Developers,” Claire Cain Miller discusses Twitter’s new gameplan. Although Twitter’s official direction may be unconfirmed, the writing is on the wall. Recently, they acquired Atebits, maker of Tweetie for the iPhone. In addition, they stated that they will be working with Research In Motion to cover the BlackBerry market. If that weren’t enough to give developers a scare, Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder, said recently, “When we launched, Twitter was incomplete, so developers rushed to fill those holes, but eventually we’re going to have to build a lot of features in because they should be there.”

The SSN Take: Watch closely as Twitter unveils new applications, which you can expect to deliver advantages that outside developers can’t.

David Hardt, April 20, 2010

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