One paragraph in an email to a developer list, defines the next drama in the Twitter develosphere.

"We also want to acknowledge that there are going to be some things that developers want to do that just aren't supported by the platform. Rather than granting additional privileges to accommodate those requests, we encourage developers to focus on what's possible within the rich variety of integration options already provided."

I can't tell you for sure what that means, but I can tell you what I think it means. Twitter makes the back-end system and they make apps. They are going to make features available to their apps that are not available to competitive apps. Presumably features that users will want and/or will make Twitter money.

Microsoft did something like that, connecting their operating system -- Windows -- and their apps: Excel, Word, Powerpoint, et al. There were private APIs that made their apps run better than 1-2-3, WordPerfect, etc. Microsoft denied they were doing it.

Twitter is not only are they admitting they're doing it, but they're giving developers a heads-up. They may regret doing that, because the developers aren't entirely without options. They also might regret doing it because they are sheltering internal developers from competition, and developers without competition are lazy developers. Hard to motivate.

Regardless, if you develop Twitter apps you should be aware.

 2/12/2011; 10:38:34 AM.   .

I buy lots of stuff on Amazon. Sound systems, clothes, books, gum, vitamins, light bulbs, batteries, hot sauce, cameras -- tons of stuff.

The Recommendations page on Amazon shows me stuff like the stuff I've bought in the past. They also develop an idea of how often I buy certain things and automatically recommend them when it's possible the last one they sold me is exhausted (vitamins) or needs replacement (toothbrushes).

I was curious to see what 3TB disks sell for now, so I did a search. Now, for the next few weeks I'll see disks and other computer accessories in Recommendation. But over time it will drop off, until I remember to look again.

I spend a lot of time thinking about news, and listening to people's dreams for how a news system works. If I were to distill down everyone's wishes to a single expression it would be this: Find me stuff I'm interested in.

And Amazon has shown us how to do it. Wish I had seen this before.

I have a feed of things I link to, which then flows to River2 subscribers, and through TwitterFeed, to people who follow me on Twitter. Every one of those links is potentially telling my news system that this is something I'm interested in.

When I push a link out not only am I sharing the link with people who follow me, and bookmarking it for future reference -- I could also be informing a news engine of my interests. So then what comes back to me, on my River page, are news items that relate to the things I'm interested in.

I just became the Editor In Chief of my own publication, one that probably has a readership of 1, but a very important demographic (me!).

I'm putting this out there because I want it. Give me back a feed of stories related to the ones in my feed.

This is a great idea for a startup.

 2/12/2011; 10:13:10 AM.   .