Serial entrepreneur and ‘social magazine’ startup Flipboard founder and CEO Mike McCue recently stepped down from Twitter’s board. He quit at a time the social networking company is irking a large part of the oh-so-crucial third-party developer community in a bid to gain more control over the overall user experience.
McCue originally joined Twitter’s board in late 2010 but quit about a month ago.
Yesterday, no longer a Twitter board member but still a shareholder, McCue was interviewed by The Telegraph about the ongoing transition of the company, and he apparently couldn’t refrain from expressing quite a bit of concern.
“Twitter can be incredibly valuable as an open communications mechanism but, if you close too many things down too quickly, if you think about it too short-sightedly, you could easily do a lot of damage to that ecosystem,” he told the paper.
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He adds: “Twitter was created as an open platform, an open communications ecosystem, and I hope it can stay that way. You have to be really careful not to let money get in the way of that.”
This isn’t exactly scathing criticism, but they are very interesting comments considering McCue’s ongoing relationship with (and reliance on) Twitter.
Twitter is expected to clash with Flipboard at one point or another, despite McCue’s good personal relationships with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (who’s an investor in Flipboard) and chief executive officer Dick Costolo.
Flipboard, meanwile, recently hit 20 million users and 3 billion ‘flips’, and added ‘TV’ video channels to its apps.
The company also recently branched out from iOS to Android.
Indeed, McCue tells The Telegraph that he believes the changes Twitter has made recently will prove not to become “too big a deal” for Flipboard.
Time, as they say, will tell.
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