the (potential) tragedy of twitter.

In a recent post, I argued that Twitter wasn’t a social network; it is a communications platform. That the minds behind Twitter didn’t understand that their initial actions were moving them away from network or destination status, or didn’t care, is quickly becoming the tragedy.

Twitter is making a series of bold, not quite inspiring, not very noble-looking moves, to undo their own history.

The latest of these moves is the (as yet) unconfirmed acquisition of Tweetdeck. While some are calling a $40 million purchase price an indicator of a bubble, I’d argue it is something different. An indicator of desperation is more accurate… Because Twitter is one of the leading examples of a startup that didn’t need to have a plan to make money yet, because it was going go build a community.

Twitter seems to have realized that it’s not going to create a model that isn’t based on owning destinations.

Twitter’s main innovation in business model was inviting developers to help them define what the platform was, what the norms of the user experience were, and what the potential future of Twitter as an experience was. Twitter was rightly praised for this, it was gamechanging thinking, taking one of the most powerful parts of opensource and internalizing it.

And now that the platform, experience and future have been defined, Twitter has decided to renege on the deal, and try to take that control back, by complicating the developer experience, discouraging 3rd party clients, and buying the leading players in the space, those with the biggest installed user base.

Twitter became a platform, and invited people to create it. Twitter is attempting to become a series of destinations; a pro app (Tweetdeck), a consumer level app (formerly Tweetie) and a web app (Twitter.com). By limiting access as much as possible to those access points, it becomes a company that can sell reaching users as the point of contact.

The tragedy is that we’re losing the best example of an open social platform, rather than a closed social experience. And we should have seen it coming. We should have seen it coming because Twitter wanted to be a business, and didn’t know or care how to make money to support itself.

That, in an of itself, is the best indicator of ideals and behaviours earmarked for retraction.