Blindsided. “@twitter: We’re rolling out an email notification that lets you know if someone you follow retweets or favorites you”
Really dude? Blindsided? C’mon…
Tim Haines is the founder of Favstar, which in late May, took it on the chin when Twitter announced that they were launching a feature set that was essentially a repackaging of what Favstar does. Except that it was now built natively into Twitter. Boom, goodnight Favstar.
Now Tim is more than likely a good dude with whom I’d have a lot in common. And I have no particular disrespect for him, or for his products. But I do think that if you build a feeder business, on the back of another host business, it’s just a matter of time before you get smooshed by the host. Particularly if the core of your business, is to essentially provide a missing feature that the host business hasn’t yet released themselves.
So not only should Tim here not have been blindsided by this, he should have been expecting it from day one. As traffic was ramping up on Favstar, all on the back of Twitter users wanting these particular features, he and the team should have been frantically thinking about ways to leverage this traffic and user-base to launch new products, that were not so dependent on the whims of a third party.
It’s more than fine to launch a business like this (in fact, some would say that this api-driven, build on top of other products ecosystem actually drives the web), but to think that this type of business is sustainable in the long term, is (in my opinion) delusional. When you build on the back of another platform, you unfortunately serve at the pleasure of that platform.
Companies like Twitter and Facebook are businesses. They have boards, and employees, and investors, all of whom have reasonable expectations that their respective companies will continue to evolve and innovate. And at various points within these evolutionary paths, it’s going to be their growth or yours. And who do you think Twitter or Facebook is going to go with? Trust me, they aren’t going to forgo launching essential features, native to their own platforms, in order to keep your little app in business.

And it isn’t just Tim and Favstar (I really don’t mean to pick on him, just needed an example here). Ubermedia had a gut-punch moment earlier this year, and now guys like Twitpic and YFrog are getting steamrolled too.
So if you are an entrepreneur whose business lives or dies by the access to (and benevolence from) another business, beware. And start thinking more long-view. Don’t wait until it’s too late.

