Is the Shuttering of Tweeterboard a Sign of a Failing Twitter Economy?

Tweetscan. Summize. Twellow. Twhirl.

Four application names that have sprung out of dozens, if not hundreds, of applications built on top of the application everyone loves to hate: Twitter.

Everyone knows the Fail Whale. Everyone threatens to jump ship, signing up for whatever new and shiny "Twitter killer" comes along. Yet there Twitter is, warts and all, up and down all day, and taking all the associated apps along with it, while users are doing no more than making empty threats.

I've wondered more than once what it must be like to have developed an application for Twitter only to see API calls throttled, changes made to the app and the API without warning, and constant outages. I imagine I'd probably have pulled my hair out by now. And I'd definitely be contemplating what Gene Smith did in shuttering Tweeterboard.

You can argue that Tweeterboard was a nifty stats tool and nothing more, and that it wasn't anything that Smith planned on building a business around, but the end-of-lifing for Tweeterboard may simply be the first of many. As Smith said himself:

"On top of that, there aren't all that many rewards for building things on top of Twitter. Sure, there are tons of active Twitter users. But with all the outages and the arbitrary changes in the API limits, I just haven't been feeling the love. Tweeterboard's gone from a fun diversion to a distraction."

One of the driving forces behind Twitter's widespread adoption has been the sheer number of applications built on it. There are games users could play. There are tracking devices to tell you how long your average Tweets are. There are conversation tools and broadcast tools and you can auto-feed announcements through it as well. You can view stats, view friends, and view relationships, all with pretty graphs and charts and colors. You can pretty much do whatever you could think of, and a lot you might not have thought of, by using some application that's built on the service.

The inevitable frustration and downtime these developers must feel has to be staggering. And with many saying that the conversation is moving elsewhere, if the application economy disappears as one by one developers get fed up and move onto something else, will Twitter start bleeding users as well?