The vast majority of Twitter users today use the web interface or Twitter's own apps. These are ordinary people, not tech geeks. They don't care about APIs - they don't even know what that is. Twitter doesn't hurt them by restricting their service to their own apps. It's pretty unlikely that these people will ever want to pay $50 a year for a micro messaging service like app.net or care enough about not being a product, so they will never be the focus of app.net.
Twitter enjoys a tremendous popularity because of all those celebrities using the service. I mean celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, not like John Gruber. And that keeps the masses coming to Twitter. It does turn away the tech folks though, the people who used Twitter in its very beginning and which are now turned away by its politics.
Twitter enjoys a tremendous popularity because of all those celebrities using the service. I mean celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, not like John Gruber. And that keeps the masses coming to Twitter. It does turn away the tech folks though, the people who used Twitter in its very beginning and which are now turned away by its politics.