When we launched, Twitter was incomplete, so developers rushed to fill those holes, but eventually we’re going to have to build a lot of features in because they should be there. We want to set those expectations.

—Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive: via NYT. Fred Wilson called this, “the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s ” for Apple.

I think the time for filling the holes in the Twitter service has come and gone. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.

—Fred Wilson, asking what is the equivalent to superwall and social gaming on Facebook for Twitter: via AVC. He enumerates five categories: social gaming – really?; verticals – stocktwits, but perhaps tlists; enterprise – cotweet, hootsuite, but perhaps just another hole for twitter to sell applications for managing multiple accounts to enterprises; discovery – hunch, listorious, tweetmeme, cadmus, wefollow, mrtweet, and any number of assorted efforts toward serendipity; analytics – Wilson intimates that the enterprise hole will likely be filled when he alludes to Twitter delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users, but he suggests that there might be enough room left over for bit.ly, Radian6, Hubspot, scout labs – perhaps room for an acquisition.

This whole thing has really turned the developer ecosystem upside down…I believe this is a great opening for Twitter’s competitors to woo developers over to other platforms such as Facebook.  I’ve had conversations with numerous other companies and developers and the overriding theme in all of those was the need to ‘distance ourselves from Twitter.’

—Paul McDonald, the developer of UberTwitter, relating “quite a shock”: via WSJ

To be clear, we are going to work hard to improve our product, add new functionality, make acquisitions when it’s in the best interest of users and the whole ecosystem at large. Each one of those things has the potential to upset a company or developer that may have been building in that space and they then have to look for new ways to create value for users.

—Ryan Sarver, head of platform, Twitter: via Google Groups, 11 April 2010