As a developer of nifty 3rd party tools, I find it interesting lately to watch the negative feedback we, along with other large applications like Twitter receive on a daily basis should something go amiss.  Twitter, long plagued with it’s reliability seems to have hoards of people screaming and yelling at them regularly, should the site go down unexpectedly for an hour.  Due to this, this brings a few issues front and center for them, other developers and the general population.

1. I firmly believe well regarded social media companies skimp on traditional means of communication handling and customer service.  Twitter for example, makes no mention on their homepage or to the general population for that matter that they actually do, have a live body handling customer satisfaction for them.  For reference, you can find the wonderful Crystal here.  Although Twitter is actively in pursuit of bodies to assist in customer support, I think much of the brands damage has been done at this point due to their reactionary approach.  This reactionary point leads into point #2

2. The developer community of any popular application is typically regarded as a group of individuals who create exciting applications, to enhance the user experience.  In Twitter’s case, hundreds if not thousands of applications are in existence today or are in development.  That said, Twitter in particular has caused developers and myself a tremendous amount of grief over the last bit due to API tweeks, unannounced API issues etc.  Their ability to actively make an entrepreneur question whether or not they should continue funding or put funds into developing off of their API seems to be an art on their part, albeit in the wrong fashion.  For the record, I have been questioning this as of late with our Tweepular.com tool.

We have had many instances where the API throws weird errors or simply stops functioning due to Twitter over capacity issues or changes they have made without proactively providing their devs a heads up.  This certainly needs to change or attrition of the developer community will be futile.  This now leads into and 3rd point/comment..

3.  Freemium sites like Twitter, Facebook or even Tweepular for that matter are a service developed for the community to use and leverage.  That said, the site is FREE and currency does not exchange hands in use of the service.  So if that’s the case does the regular population have the right to chastise the service, spread organic expressions of distaste or even demand corrective remedy?  I’ve been struggling with this as of late.  On one hand the service is free, on the other it’s the goodwill of the user base that creates demand and a developer must protect.  Is currency these days uniques and repeat visits and how do developers leverage and protect this from the seemingly upward rise in the expectation of users using the services on a daily basis?

Thoughts?