Are Developers Bailing On Twitter? You Tell Us
Jesse calls himself "the Social Applications Guru", and for all we know he's plugged in to the Twitter developer community, and knows of many cases where people have thrown up their hands and walked away from Twitter-related projects. But he doesn't actually provide any examples of said phenomenon; unless we're missing something, he's just quoting a couple developers complaining about the service on Google Groups -- just like regular Twitter users.
If developers really are bailing on Twitter, then that's a real problem: They've been a key part of the service's growth, and a majority of Twitter use away from the main site, on apps they've built using the service's open API. But our hunch is that until users abandon Twitter for something else, developers are going to keep supporting Twitter, too.
UPDATE: Twitter's Biz Stone says developers love the service.
See Also:
Twitter Explains Why Twitter Crashes All The Time...On Twitter
Twitter Downtime: As Bad As Everyone Says It Is
The twitter interruptions haven't really bothered these bots other than people can send an @ reply when Twitter is down.
Twitter's API doesn't have any problems that normal users are experiencing.
The maintainer of an entire Twitter library jumped ship. Net::Twitter, the Perl Twitter library's author and original maintainer jumped ship and handed over development to another developer. There are many Twitter-based applications using that library right now. True, it's not dead, but moves like this are still unsettling and show the developer frustration that's out there.
The point of my article is that developers are getting frustrated with Twitter, and with evidences like this, Twitter really needs to be careful with how they accommodate the development community. I have seen pieces of the API removed with little to no notice, changes pushed live with no testing, and many other bad practices that, for a developer looking in, just do not look promising, and frankly, scare me as a developer. Other developers are seeing the same thing and I know it won't be long before you start to see some much bigger profile developers jump ship down the road as well.