Breaking from their traditional strategy of creating open APIs and letting developers build applications, today Twitter released an official application for owners of Blackberry phones that they helped to build, along with RIM.
You can find it at Blackberry.com/Twitter, if you want to download it. Someone stick a fork in Twitterberry and UberTwitter, if this application is good, they are about to be blown out of the water.
What does that application do? According to the Twitter blog post on the topic it has Real-time “BlackBerry push of Twitter direct messages, ” and “inbox integration so you can read your Twitter direct messages along side your email and text messages.” Nothing revolutionary.
However, if you did hear that thud, that was the Twitter application development community all having their jaws hit the floor at once. Twitter is now essentially going head to head with their own third party developers, the people that actually built the Twitter that you know and love.
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Twitter investor Fred Wilson spoke of “filling holes” in Twitter, now that the company has the manpower to do so. This is the first step in that process.
Why Blackberry and not iPhone is anyone’s guess, but the war that every developer feared is starting now: Twitter is going to get into the app business, now having seemed to have fixed at least some of its downtime issues.
Developers using Twitter’s APIs, what do you think?
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