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Last week brought two major announcements from Twitter. On Thursday, the company announced an official application for BlackBerry. On Friday, Twitter announced that it had purchased Atebits, the makers of the iPhone app Tweetie . Over the weekend, there was substantial discussion and a fair amount of hand-wringing by third-party developers, many expressing their frustrations about the company's direction. Attempting to reassure developers in advance of next week's Chirp conference, Twitter API lead Ryan Sarver responded by email to some of these concerns. Sponsor Certainly Twitter isn't the only company at the center of debates about control of a platform (Apple, Google, and Microsoft come to mind), but in light of the flurry of responses to Twitter's moves, it is worth considering some of the (perhaps contradictory) lessons for startups that can be gleaned from the past week's events. Find your niche : Much of the third-party development on Twitter has served to address gaps in the original product: mobile clients, URL shorteners, photo sharing, and search for example. As VC and Twitter investor Fred Wilson argued in a blog post early last week that tipped the hand, perhaps, to where Twitter was headed, there is still room for the development of "killer apps" in social gaming, enterprise, and analytics. Innovate and adapt : Find your niche, but then be prepared to innovate and adapt. Some have suggested that Twitter's acquisition of Tweetie might not bode well for other Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck , unless the two can continue to innovate. By adding new features unavailable via the Twitter website, and by linking streams from Facebook and LinkedIn, they have established themselves as more than just a Twitter client - but the pressure is certainly on for these to continue to distinguish themselves from the official Twitter applications. "Of course we're hole fillers," Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur admits , explaining that while that's a good place to start, it isn't the right place to end. Look beyond the platform : As Mark Suster writes of both Twitter and the iPhone, it is important to think beyond the platform, contending that startups should not think of Twitter "as a business but rather as a channel." In other words, a platform like Twitter should be a used as a way to reach customers but, unless you're Twitter, should not be the vehicle itself. If this is the " inflection point " for Twitter, the tasks for startups will be to learn the lessons from this critical juncture in the platform's history, balancing the sometimes contradictory needs for specificity and flexibility and innovation and stability. Discuss

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What Can Startups Learn from Last Week's Twitter Announcements?

Microsoft announced a new phone this morning called the Kin . It's all about being social: putting the stream of updates from your friends on Facebook and Twitter at the center of the experience, dragging photos to share them on the web, etc. It's a Zune phone, it will be on Verizon exclusively and no pricing information is available yet. At first glance this looks like a lightweight device aimed at people who don't want to pay for an iPhone and for whom apps are less important than a strong focus on social networking. That might have made sense a year ago when Microsoft bought Danger, the makers of the Sidekick and the system the Kin seems to be built on, but does it still make sense today? I don't think so. Sponsor Social networking is no longer the destination, it's now the context. It's the identity that people use to log-in to apps and share the results back to their friends. Mobile phones are about powerful, intriguing apps, these days. Analyst firm Piper Jaffray reported this morning , for example, that teen intent to purhase the iPhone has doubled over the last year to 31% - and that despite the cost. It's because of the apps. The user experience plus huge store full of apps plus marketing make the Apple world very hard to beat on mobile. Where are the apps for the Kin? There doesn't appear to be any, other than the built-in features like automatic online backup of photos and the creation of a photo timeline. It's important to give people access to Facebook, Twitter and MySpace - but is that really enough anymore? I'd argue that it's not. The Apple app store has so caught the imagination of so many people, that's where the action and excitement are on mobile. Perhaps that's just among the slightly more geeky though, perhaps a low-cost Facebook phone will win the hearts of millions. Six months ago the Palm Pixi was mentioned as a low-cost app-savvy mobile phone that could increase youth use of smartphones , but it doesn't appear that that's happened. Probably in large part because the Palm app store is paltry. Many young people buy feature phones and supplement them with iPod Touches - for the apps. That still sounds like the smartest move for the young people being targeted by the Kin. That way you get the apps you want without a monthly data plan. Maybe the Kin will have a strong mobile browser and support the growth of a non-native, web based app ecosystem. That's not the way it's being framed, though. Maybe I just don't get the appeal: the promo copy honestly says that among the things the Kin will hold is "your drama." That sounds frightening to me. What do you think, do you think a social phone is sufficiently compelling for users? Discuss

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Microsoft's New Phone Gets the Social/App Balance Wrong

Nokia acquired location-based services company MetaCarta on Friday, a service with two distinct focuses: geosearch and geotagging . With MetaCarta's geosearch technology, the service finds content, data and information about a place and then presents it in a single mapped-based view using any map server, whether one from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, ESRI or another company. The geotagging technology, on the other hand, lets MetaCarta pull geographic references from online content and then allow that information to be used in other applications. Sponsor One of the more notable examples of MetaCarta technology is the NewsMap application, a hosted mashup that extracts the geographic information found in news articles and displays those locations as icons on a digital map. Users can then zoom in and out on the map to see where the news is happening and what stories correspond to the map icons. For a real-world example of how Newsmap works, you can visit DailyRecord , a news site which features an embedded "news map" at the bottom of their homepage. For another example of a similar technology, see Bing Maps's Local Lens application , a map layer that identifies news stories by city and neighborhood and maps them out using the Bing Maps service. (Bing Maps does not use MetaCarta's technology, it's just similar.) Although news maps like those above are somewhat interesting, the most intriguing thing about this new acquisition is not the map app, but the technology behind it. Basically, the geotagging aspect to the MetaCarta service can add location data to existing information that previously had none. In doing so, a company could build up a geo-database that could function as the backend for all sorts of location-based services from social apps to local search tools and more. And the need to have an accurate, rich and complete geo-database is going to be a key component to winning a top position in the emerging location-based services market. Nokia hasn't specified exactly how it plans to use the newly acquired company's technology, only saying that "MetaCarta's technology will be used in the area of local search in location and other services." It's not a leap, though, to assume that MetaCarta's technology could be integrated into Nokia's free Ovi Maps mobile application. Nokia has had a clear focus on location-based services as of late. The company acquired the social travel service Dopplr in September of last year and later launched turn-by-turn navigation for Ovi Maps in January. However, the company's largest mapping-related acquisition to date is still the $8.1 billion purchase of digital map provider Navteq in 2007. Discuss

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Nokia Expands its Geolocation Plans with Location Services Buy

Apparently Steve Jobs has gone and answered another customer email, this time sending shockwaves through the tech world with two words - "Sorry, no." According to a Mac rumors blog , a German user emailed Jobs asking if Apple was planning on "supporting/updating the iPhone 2G in the Future" and that was Jobs' answer. We know it's only been a couple of years since the iPhone was originally released, but is this all that surprising? Sponsor It has been nearly two years since the iPhone 2G was available for sale, though you can still find plenty of them on Ebay , but the same can be said for other old beasts . Should we really expect Apple to continue releasing updates for outdated hardware? As it is, the iPhone OS 4.0 isn't going to support the iPhone 3G for half of its functionality - what are we looking for with iPhone 2G support then? After all, with Apple's infamously closed platform, are we looking for much in the way of bug fixes and security holes? Now, if only Microsoft would do the same for Internet Explorer 6, we could all move on with our lives. Discuss

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Apple To End iPhone 2G Support? Jobs Says So

Before tonight there were probably 30 to 50 teams making a serious play to build the best mobile client for Twitter. Tonight one of those teams was annointed the official selection of Twitter itself and its leader at least is now a millionaire. People are saying that the acquisition of Tweetie by Twitter is bad news for the ecosystem of 3rd party developers that made Twitter so much more useful for millions of people. In truth though, those odds were pretty good for all of them. Tonight's news demonstrates again that independent developers can code their way into cash, equity and a job at one of the hottest startups on the web. That bodes well for those of us who love to use the software built by all of them, too. Sponsor Tweetie developer Loren Brichter is just 4 years out of college. He graduated from Tufts in 2006 and got a job doing embedded graphics and iPhone development for Apple through July, 2007. That month, the iPhone 3G was released and that year Time Magazine named it the invention of the year. After more than a year of development Tweetie was launched in November, 2008. Less than 18 months later Brichter and Twitter announced tonight that Tweetie has been acquired and will become "Twitter for iPhone." Between cash and equity, Brichter must be a millionaire on paper at least. Brichter's one employee is Ash Ponders, who is in Spain and isn't saying anything on Twitter tonight. These guys built a service that won the big contest. If there were (and this is generous) 50 viable mobile Twitter clients - do you really think any of them launched this kind of business expecting better odds than that? There are a number of other companies that could have become the official mobile app for Twitter but at this stage of the game Tweetie was an obvious choice. It loads fast, is relatively feature rich, is attractively designed and has proven popular with users. Tweetie offers an attractive and simple desktop Twitter client, but was most valued for its iPhone version. Its strongest competitors were Twitterific , Tweetdeck and Seesmic . Twitterific is beautiful and perhaps a viable ad-supported small business but is too complicated to be appreciated by all but power users. (It's great on the iPad though.) Seesmic is strong on the smaller Android platform and is extending beyond Twitter alone. Tweetdeck is the most powerful 3rd party Twitter app but it has higher aspirations, is exploring development of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence , is more complex than mainstream users need and is most likely to be bought by an enterprise, media or financial services company - not Twitter itself. Tweetie is the everyperson's Twitter app. Twitter is chronically confusing for mainstream users, something the company has been trying desperately to change. If you are looking for a simple, attractive Twitter app for casual use then Tweetie on the desktop works great. When you're on a mobile phone, that's really all you ever need. In his blog post tonight Loren Brichter mentioned "simplifying the Twitter experience." That's something Twitter needs and something he's very qualified to help do. There is still a place for other, more complex, Twitter apps. Media companies around the world (including this one) are finding Tweetdeck invaluable in carefully parsing the stream of Tweets for high-value nuggets. Seesmic is believed to be working closely with Microsoft in order to bring social media stream reading to all kinds of different platforms. But tonight one of the many Twitter apps hit it big. That's good news for app developers in general and for the users who would use their software. Go ahead and build a client for a major social network. Odds are it won't prove a viable business, but if you were risk averse then building a Twitter client startup is probably the last thing on earth you'd do anyway. The fairy tale came true for one of these companies. That's reason enough for many more developers to build many more innovative apps in the future. Discuss

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Why Twitter Buying Tweetie is Great News