Agreed. It would be a much more compelling argument if there were examples of successful API companies presented as possible models for Twitter as an API company. (In addition to the example of Google as an advertising company.)
I do think there are several large cloud companies that have both their "native" UI and rich/powerful APIs. For instance Salesforce, which my company both pays for & extensively modifies and extends via their API. Given the attention this post has attracted I may write a followup post just on this topic.
I hope you do, I am very interested in this topic and I would like to hear what you say and what people have to say in response to it.
in other words - isn't this kind of the point? google is the big advertising company. everyone else is a copy. the big api company is still open space...
??? There was a whole generation of successful advertising (Internet) companies before Google. Even Google went through an internal debate about how much/whether to copy the best of that generation (Yahoo). And advertising-funded businesses are decades older than the Internet.
Also, 1 exemplar >> 0 exemplars was my point.