I can't see Twitter surviving if their long term strategy is to sell firehouse access to their competitors. Relying on your competitors to keep in business is a bad business plan to say the least.<p>The way I see it they're pretty much screwed. They're going to have to start looking at different ways to monetize and they don't have many choices. Injecting adds into everyone's Twitter stream will mean a drop in users for sure plus it will contaminate the firehose. Relying on smaller developers to pay for API access probably isn't going to generate enough revenue especially if other options are available from Google et al. Once again, Google will destroy yet another marker with free...<p>Of course one also has to wonder if Twitter isn't just a "pet rock" that will run out steam on it's own.
<i>Debates about how ‘Twitter is this’ and ‘Twitter is that’ have become an almost-daily spiel for us internet folks.</i><p>This was true 2-3 years ago. Most of us "internet folks" have since moved onto more interesting frontiers. The conclusion that Twitter's real value is the open API is something that I heard at every conference I went to in 2007. It was sort of a novel idea when there were still relatively few open APIs, mashups were new, and before Facebook launched their platform. Sure Twitter still drives pageviews for silicon valley rags like TC, but there's not much interesting to say about them anymore.
About a point he makes later in the post, is it "confirmed" that Twitter is getting paid by Google/MS/Yahoo for the Firehose? It seems reasonable, but it's still just rumor isn't it?