All products are built on someone else’s platform to some degree. However some products exclusively only offer an alternate experience to someone else’s platform. If you build such a product you are signing up to be disrupted by the whims and fancies of the platform owner. You are on borrowed time from the day you start. It is only a matter of when. It doesn’t matter how much you contribute to the growth of the underlying platform or how much you help unleash its power or how good your product it.
You build products that optimize experiences of other platforms because you really feel you have value to add. But the value you perceive you are adding might not, on a given day, matter to the platform owner. Then you are toast. It is a sad fact but a fact nonetheless.
While this is absolutely true for products, it is largely true for content as well. Wherever you upload your content to someone else’s platform, it is bound to be thrown out some day. Your Instagram posts are going to go the way of detailed reviews many wrote on Netflix. Or your myspace site.
Thank you, Twitterific and Tweetbot, for making great products on Twitter’s platform. Like all death, yours is shocking, but not surprising.