Can Twitter succeed by alienating developers?

Twitter recently announced two strategic decisions that risk ticking off its own developers and users. It's a risky strategy, but one which has succeeded for companies like Apple and Microsoft.

Twitter's new advertising model, announced Tuesday, will have the company selling sponsored tweets, called "Promoted Tweets."

The ads could alienate Twitter's users, said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. "[I]f the ads look like regular tweets, that could cause some serious outrage from users who feel that Twitter is attempting to deceive them."

Twitter.com says ads will be clearly labeled as "promoted." But other than that they'll just be regular tweets--users can reply, retweet and mark the tweets as favorites.

The ads might be problematic for companies who are already selling ads on Twitter and realtime search. These include OneRiot, as well as TweetUp, which had the incredible bad fortune to launch this week.

Likewise, the Twitterific Twitter app is funded through advertising.

Twitter plans to allow developers to share in the revenue by displaying ads in third-party Twitter clients, which should help mitigate developers' concerns.

Even before the ad announcement, Twitter and its partners were already colliding.

On Friday, Twitter announced it's buying Atebits and that company's Tweetie app. Developer Loren Brichter will join Twitter. Twitter said it needs its own Twitter app for the iPhone, to reduce confusion, "People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they're not finding one. So, they get confused and give up," Twitter said on its blog.

The purchase leaves developers on other platforms scrambling. For example, Tapbots, which makes the outstanding Weightbot and Pastebot iPhone apps (two of my favorite iPhone apps), has been working in secret on its own Twitter app for two and a half months.

Twitter's Atebots acquisition leaves Tapbots stranded. "We probably won’t be able to charge for the app anymore. Who’s going to pay for a Twitter client when 'Tweetie' is free? .... The last thing we want to do is just give up, but we need questions answered before we can continue moving forward."

Will this strategy of stepping on partners' toes work for Twitter? It's worked for Apple, which has made a succession of decisions with regard to the iPhone that make developers' lives difficult. These decisions include requiring developers to distribute their software through the App Store, and refusing to support Flash on the iPhone and iPad. Recently, Apple changed the iPhone developers terms of service to banish apps written for third-party platforms, such as Adobe Flash, or Microsoft .NET, and compiled to run on the iPhone.

Apple's strategy is to always do what's best for the platform, not for its partners, says Ars Technica's John Siracusa. That's a dangerous strategy, but a winnable one.

The proposition is this: Apple is betting it can grow its platform fast enough, using any means necessary, that developers will stick around despite all the hardships and shoddy treatment. Each time it chooses to do what it thinks is best for the future of the iPhone OS platform instead of what will please developers, Apple is pushing more chips into the pot.

Nor is this strategy unique to Apple. Microsoft and other vendors have a history of stepping on their partners' toes, writes Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times:

“That’s how it always is when you develop for a corporate-owned platform,” Dave Winer, software developer, blogger and visiting scholar at New York University, wrote last week. “You have to make peace with that reality before you write your first line of code.”

Microsoft, for example, became ubiquitous in large part because of all the tools, like memory managers, that outside developers built. Once Microsoft built memory managers into Windows, those start-ups became irrelevant.