This past weekend, Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone spoke at Startup School. Before they took the stage, they met up with Y Combinator’s Paul Graham and came up with a great idea: A deal to ensure that Y Combinator startups working on Twitter-related projects have priority access to the tweet stream, as well as access to Twitter’s team.
The idea led Graham to delay the application deadline for YC Winter 2010 startups for two days, so they could release two new Requests For Startups (RFS), YC’s recently announced program that gives applicants basic big picture ideas from which to form startups around. One of these new RFSes is obviously to build something on top of Twitter. Here’s the description:
RFS 3: Things Built on Twitter
Twitter is important because it’s a new protocol. Fundamentally it’s a messaging protocol where you don’t specify the recipients. It’s really more of a discovery than an invention; that square was always there in the periodic table of protocols, but no one had quite hit it squarely.
Successful new protocols are rare. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. Each one of those protocols has spawned many successful companies. Twitter will too.
We want to fund those companies. And the people at Twitter also want to encourage people to built stuff on top of it. So together we came up with a plan: anyone YC funds to do a startup based on Twitter will get priority access to the Twitter stream, and to people at Twitter.
Twitter hasn’t specified exactly what type of access to its stream YC startups will get (there are a number of levels with various call rate limits). But the assumption is that these startups will get the type of access that Twitter gives to its preferred third-party developers.
And the access to the Twitter team may be even more vital. Twitter is in the process of rolling out several new APIs for new features it is working on like Lists, Retweets, and Geolocation. Having face time with Twitter’s team for these types of things could certainly help YC startup build some great tools on top of the platform.
On the flip-side, Twitter will see a group of hand-selected startups that at the very least have interesting ideas for what to do with the platform.
Alongside the new Twitter RFS, Y Combinator is also announcing a RFS for live video. This is the result of a similar partnership (as the Twitter one) with Justin.TV that will give YC startups that work on this RFS the best access to Justin.TV’s stream, as well as access to the company’s founders and engineers.
The new Winter 2010 deadline for YC will be October 28 at 10 pm Pacific.
[photo: flickr/JChetan]
That’s just awesome.
What a nice thing of Twitter to do for the YCombinator portfolio! That’s the good thing about new protocols; the single private company behind them can effectively mandate the funding strategies of startups who want full access to the protocol. Sweet!
+1
Such an idealist Marshall
Until we live in that world, this is a great deal for both companies.
Until we live in the world where microblogging is done over an interoperable protocol not controlled by one company then it’s a great deal for the controlling company and it’s favored investment group? Agreed! Heck, sounds like a blog post I oughta write. Especially since you didn’t.
Twitter being called a protocol just scared the shit out of me.
This may also be a nice fast track to be acquired by Twitter.
1. Come up with amazing 3rd party tool that works w/ Twitter.
2. Apply to YC, get stream, get seed money
3. Do something amazing using Twitter stream
4. Sell to Twitter and make quick buck.
I’d go as far to say that if you’re looking for a job at Twitter, do this and you’d have a better chance of being acquired than just applying for a job directly with them. I’m guessing they’re getting thousands of resumes a month.
*note: i’m talking out my butt here*
problem is twitter doesnt seem to buy a lot of companies
I’m not sure it’s a great idea to give priority to YC startups when they’ve got thousands of existing developers pouring sweat into their platform.
At the very least they should outline ways that non YC companies gain this type of support.
This smells like the same buddy system that caused the SUL to upset so many.
I’m sure if you reach out to either team with a great idea, they’ll be more than happy to work with you. I’m sure YC just makes sense because there is already a lot of activity going on there, so it makes most sense as a starting point.
Last time when we were asking to get access to the a subset of the twitter firehose, we only got a negative answer.
Nice to hear that there doesn”t seem to be any rules for their buddies, and they get access directly…
Duh! Welcome to the real world.
its inside baseball and the single best way to guarantee less innovation around the twitter “protocol.”
Fantastic news, Guess I better revise my y-combinator pitch now though….
Great news for twitter. But cmon, how many YC start-ups have made it big? Zero?
If you did some research, you won’t be asking that question.
reddit (has a higher 3-month Alexa rank than TC)
Tipjoy
WuFoo
DropBox
i’minlikewithyou
Loopt
Posterous
JumpChat (didn’t take off, but John Resig wrote JQuery and other awesome stuff)
Do I need to go on?
http://www.tech...to-the-deadpool
you’re missing justintv and scribd
reddit.com is a YC-Funded company.
http://en.wikip...ki/Y_Combinator lists the companies. They have been doing this for Only 4 years, and I would say have a respectable level of success.
When I start my new company, I’ll be sure to apply.
Yawn
Awesome, can’t wait to see where this will lead.
Twicsy want access too pleeeeeeease.
Trying not to write a knee jerk response to this but I think this is just another slap in the face to the developers that have made their company what it is for free.
How about instead of making announcements like this they actually create a proper developer network and that means more than a google group and wiki.
I think twitter is great as a service but the limits make it annoying to develop on. I know they need limits but there is no clear path to get the limits lifted like there used to be.
I currently have 5 different apps using twitter and am starting to look at twitter as just another publishing point and nothing much more.
in short limits stifle innovation and favoritism of certain vendors closes doors to would be innovators.
Sounds like you need to spend less time just developing code and more time on business development.
Nothing in business comes easy. Deals don’t just happen because you write some neat code, have a good movie script, a good book, or even a killer product. They take just as much work.
You’ve got to work your business relationship with Twitter a bit more it seems. I wish the barriers were more clear and lower too, but its simply not sustainable for them.
David, I agree with some of your points but I am just a developer who likes to create stuff.
if an app of mine happens to be liked and I have passion to take it forward then great.
i as a fellow third party twitter developer thinks the idea sux.
it will be interesting to see the reaction of other developers.
basically one rule for the community and one rule for buddies.
hmmmm i’m calling the peak of twitter here.
A. This is going to upset all those existing developers that have wanted this sort of access to Twitters data. Obviously it’s up to Twitter who has access to their data, but a big dob of fairness and consistency in approach to this would be good.
B. Twitter isn’t a new protocol it’s HTTP. This is TechCrunch isn’t it? There’s no mention of this obvious error in your article.
Twitter was originally available via XMPP and SMS, as wells HTTP. SMS is still up in the US and XMPP is rumored to be coming back soon.