The Inevitable Showdown Between Twitter and Twitter Apps

Microsoft is famous for destroying companies that offer complementary products, either by bundling complementary apps with Windows (Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger, IE) or aggressively competing head-to-head against the most popular ones (Adobe, Intuit). The surviving 3rd party apps are usually ones that are too small for Microsoft to care about. The best (selfish) economic situation for a platform like Windows is lots of tiny complements that have little pricing power but that make the platform itself more valuable.

At some point, significant (non-VC) money will enter the Twitter ecosystem. I have no idea whether this is will be by charging consumers, charging businesses users, search advertising, sponsored tweets, licensing the twitter data feed, data from URL shorteners, or something else. But history suggests that where there is so much user engagement, dollars follow.