Twitter buys Tweetie making line in the sand to developers even bigger

Earlier today the big Twitter news was the fact that the new official Twitter app for the Blackberry had been written by Twitter itself which was contrary to the belief that Blackberry had created it.

Then came the news just now that Twitter has reached an agreement to buy Tweetie, long consider the premier iPhone Twitter app. Word is that Twitter will be renaming it to Twitter for the iPhone and re-releasing in the iPhone App Store for free. I wonder how all the people who paid for Tweetie are going to feel about this?

So twice in one day Twitter has for the most part told all the Twitter client developers thanks for all the help for getting us to this point but we think we’ll take over from here. It might not have been such the case with just the Blackberry Twitter app but to pour salt on an open wound by announcing the purchase of Tweetie – well it doesn’t take too many brains to read those tea leaves.

Just as Fred Wilson suggested in his blog post earlier this week Twitter is filling in its holes and this is happening at the expense of the Twitter client developers. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in the next month we see one of the AIR apps go to Twitter and then at some point one of the Windows Twitter clients will become the official Twitter for Windows app.

As well we should also expect some other of the more web type services that live on top of Twitter to get snapped up and become a part of the Twitter family. The rest of you Twitter developers .. well .. I hope you are enjoying your hobby because that is all your Twitter love is going to end up being – a hobby. If you really thought you were going to make any kind of serious business out of it today’s events had better be your wake up call.

I’ve been saying for sometime that thinking one could create a viable longterm business by hooking yourself up to some other companies API stream was a fool’s dream. At some point regardless of protestations to the opposite it is only a matter of time until your host will get tired of you living off of them and either duplicate what you are doing, buy you or a competitor, or change the rules of the games. Hell, they might do all three and that wouldn’t surprise me in the least with any of these ‘social’ companies.

Today the whole Twitter ecosphere changed. I just hope that not too many developers had any real dreams of success tied up with their efforts but maybe the next time they’ll think longer about invest too much of their time and talent into companies that will end up screwing them.