So Twitter takes one more step toward being Facebook with more in the works. I participate on Twitter more than Facebook because I see inherent advantages to the simplicity, focus, and constraints of Twitter.

Yet now I see Twitter becoming increasingly hostile to the eco-system of apps that made it what it is today. They publicly discourage the buy Summize, development of future clients, provide an official competitor on iPhone and Mac, buy TweetDeck, launch their own shortener with no analytics, and now are in direct competition with all the image services as well as all the clients. I've thought about developing applications for Twitter, but I question if there's any future in it. Twitter will probably never shutdown their API, but they'll probably increase rate limits to unreasonable levels to prevent competing products from, well, competing. Furthermore they may let it languish or rapidly evolve and modify it making it difficult for developers to keep up and greatly increasing their costs so they fall away from their apps.

Is another Facebook platform with total centralized control really what we want Twitter to become? I'd rather they took the monetization of their feed seriously. Instead they outsource the entire process of selling the feed to Gnip instead of trying to build that revenue stream without the middleman.

I think realistically I only really want to be serious about two social networks. If Twitter succeeds in converting itself from the chaotic, organic, user-driven system that I love into another top-down platform whose owners have no respect for the users who made it what it is (and I see no alternative interpretation of the approach of undermining the platform users and API developers) I think far from becoming serious competition for revenue with Facebook, Twitter likely just ends up driving me into the arms of G+.

Please don't compete for the title of worst dick in social networking, Twitter!