Interstate Twitter

Missing in all the brouhaha about Twitter’s long-suspected, newly-proven confusion about where to find a profit model and oh we’ll just borrow one from our third-party devs thankyouverymuch is a fairly straightforward observation about How Twitter Sees The Future:

Everybody should put stuff into Twitter, but only Twitter should control how stuff gets out.

If they can solve the scaling issues of being the de facto data storage mechanism for hundreds of services and millions of people who just ate some great teriyaki – which they have – and if they can monopolize the interfaces through which people retrieve that data – which they just realized matters – then they can leverage that position to fill the data stream with ads, ads, and more ads and finally have an answer to those suspenders who until recently were perfectly happy with TIME cover stories as ROI.

Going forward, expect Twitter to make building a push-data-into-Twitter service really easy and a pull-data-from-Twitter service really hard. Read anything that sounds like “we love a healthy third-party ecosystem” accordingly.