I have worked for platform companies and I have worked for companies that have built major parts of their business on platforms.  At the end of the day, if you’re not the platform OR you’re just a feature, you will get screwed in the end.  

It’s as simple as that. Don’t act like you didn’t know.

Platforms control the roadmap. If you build a feature, you will die or get eaten(maybe).

“With power comes great responsibility.”

The right thing for Twitter to do at @chirp today is to provide, what I refer to, as a heat map, which is a 12-month platform roadmap broken down into red, yellow, green feature areas as defined below:

• Red: Don’t touch feature areas Twitter will definitely build internally (ie it’s already in place) or buy (we have intentions of acquiring). Signal to developers: Don’t compete with us, but if you want to build do it, but there may be only one winner.
• Yellow: Features that Twitter is not sure whether they will build but it’s in the realm of possibility.  Signal to developers: Enter at your own risk.
• Green: Features that Twitter don’t have any plans to build in the next 12-months or in the 36-month horizon.  These are suggested business opportunities.  Fred Wilson tells this to Twitter developers, these are the real business opportunities.

We’ve seen most Twitter developers developing products/features in the Red and Yellow zone.  Here’s the Red zone:

• Location = Feature (a big one, but Twitter is just getting started. Maybe SimpleGeo or Geodelic get acquired, but I doubt it, since their feature sets are super robust and have wider application)
• URL shorterner = Feature (Twitter might develop internally or buy - I think they’ll buy bit.ly because of Betaworks but won’t be surprised if they create their own since bit.ly is used everywhere)
• Post video = Feature (Twitter might develop internally or buy - I think they’ll buy vidly)
• Post photo = Feature (Twitter might develop internally or buy - I think they’ll buy TwitPic)
• Client developed exclusively for Twitter = feature (put one developer on it, or in Twitter’s case buy the developer) 
• …

I agree with Mark Suster.  Twitter needs to sit down with Twitter developers (maybe that’s what they are going to do at Chirp) and provide clear direction.  I think the heatmap is the way to go.  It’s clean & simple. Curious to see what’s going to come out of it. 

Take the platform at it’s face value.  

As a developer, Facebook is a social graph and a feed.   Use it just for those things.  Gaming works well because you use Facebook to play with your friends and you use the feed as a way to communicate what’s happening within your game.  That’s why Zynga is building a great business on the Facebook platform.

At Socialmedia.com, I saw us build a business on top of Facebook that grew to be very profitable only to find it was killed by Facebook because they controlled the way developers could use the API.  Now Socialmedia.com is the platform that enables publishers to sell ads.

I also worked at Right90 (quanity-unit forecasting), where our product was comprehensive and we integrated with Salesforce.com.  Salesforce started building it’s own forecasting products, and we were always unsure if they were a good partner or a competing partner.  It created lots of friction in our channel sales efforts.  As one of the early sales guys, I can tell you, it wasn’t easy. Now, Right90 sells it’s product stand alone by building a very core business with enterprise value (don’t miss your forecast), and integrating with Salesforce.com is now a second thought.

Twitter is a communication protocol. 

It’s a stream of information.  Developers should use Twitter in that way - push or pull- and if there is any business to build on top of it, it’s figuring out what to do with that stream of information and build unique technology that adds value to people’s understanding of the stream.

Foursquare will pull a Twitter.

So the question is there room for open innovation on a platform? @seth asked:

“now that twitter is “guiding” its ecosystem, like fb before it, who will emerge as the next wide open platform for startup innovation?”

Tristan’s response.

Unless your business is open source software, there is no such thing as 100% open innovation.  There isn’t and I don’t care what people say.  When it comes down to it, as a platform grows its’ business, it will “do whatever it takes to grow its’ business”.  If that means building features to compete with its’ developers, then they’ll do it. If it means kill the ecosystem for the short-term, they will do it. If it means change developers API policies, it will do it.  Why? Because they have to make money.

I love how Flixup! is considered something that won’t be “gobbled up”(read Fred Wilson’s post), but the reality is that if Twitter wants to get in the “eye-ball” business, which it is (ie launch Twitter ad platform), Flixup! is in the yellow zone.

We are not working on Flixup! right now because we think there is a bigger opportunity behind Miso, but if there is anybody out there that wants to buy it, please let me know.

Contact: somrat@bazaarlabs.com