And Tumblr is happy about it. Union Metrics for Tumblr is the social blogging company’s first “preferred analytics provider.” It’s not an exclusive relationship, but it’s the first of its kind.

The new product aims to help marketers get a sense of what’s being discussed on Tumblr and how it spreads through shares (a.k.a. reblogged). It’s built on Gnip’s authorized Tumblr fire hose, which was released in April.

What’s interesting about this idea is how late it’s coming about relative to Tumblr’s popularity — especially considering Twitter’s developer ecosystem has become so fraught. Tumblr itself is just getting around to being friendly with advertisers.

And actually, Union Metrics for Tumblr is not ready yet; Union Metrics is just asking for signups today and hasn’t published pricing yet.

I asked Union Metrics CEO Hayes Davis about the difference between Tumblr and Twitter.

“We have a good relationship with Twitter, but it’s more like an arms-length kind of relationship,” he said.

Davis posited that the lag time between activity around the Twitter and Tumblr APIs are because the core early Twitter audience was tech geeks, while the early Tumblr crowd was content creators.

“I think Tumblr has its own center of gravity,” he said. “There’s an ecosystem here building over time.”

It works with a number of existing Web services like Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and the like. Say someone important like Twitter CEO Dick Costolo decides to tweet something. As a Twitter beat reporter, I want to know what Dick has to say when he says it. Using IFTTT, I can have the service send me an email, an SMS, even a phone call. It’s very useful, especially when, you know, I want to try and get some sleep.

Sadly, in an email today to its users, IFTTT announced that it was ending support for Twitter triggers, one of what I’d call the most useful parts of the service. When I saw the email in my inbox, I was instantly bummed. The way the email was worded, too, made it seem like IFTTT was the latest in a string of companies affected by Twitter’s recent overhaul of its developer guidelines (currently a hotbed of contention in the tech community that relies upon Twitter’s platform to power their services).

“In recent weeks, Twitter has announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook.”

In light of recent events and this charged language, a knee-jerk reaction of blaming Twitter was almost to be expected (and, indeed, blame was immediately placed on Twitter). The company recently axed its connection with LinkedIn, and as a product VP outlined in a detailed explanation of its new guidelines, the company won’t be as tolerant of developers who don’t follow the rules of Twitter’s road as it has been in the past.

This time, however, the devil seems to be in the details.

In a footnote to its statement on the change, IFTTT specifically cites a change in section 4A of Twitter’s developer guidelines as the reason for dropping Twitter support. It’s sort of nerdy tech jargon, but it essentially states that outside companies can’t export Twitter content to an outside cloud-based service like, say, IFTTT.

The problem is, that’s not a new rule for Twitter. In fact, according to the archive of Twitter’s developer rules of the road, this has been the case since at least April of 2011, if not longer (that’s as far back as the archive displays “recent changes”). So, essentially, IFTTT is pointing the finger at supposed changes in the Twitter ecosystem that really occurred more than a year ago.

Granted, Twitter did little to enforce many of the guidelines for quite some time. Only in the past few months has Twitter shown more willingness to bring the hammer down on those it sees breaking the rules.

So perhaps IFTTT saw the writing on the wall and decided to drop Twitter support while placing a carefully-worded jab at Twitter’s new hard-line stance on API guidelines. Or perhaps Twitter told IFTTT that it would soon cut them off, and IFTTT beat Twitter to the punch while ultimately making them look bad.

I don’t know either way, as neither company is replying to my emails.

All I know is, it’s an unfortunate loss. IFTTT’s Twitter triggers were invaluable for me, as I don’t spend my every waking minute staring at my Twitter stream.

Fortunately, there’s at least some light at the end of the tunnel. IFTTT says it is “excited to build features that work within Twitter’s new policy,” so perhaps we won’t be long without the feature set. Perhaps the current kerfuffle occurring in the blogosphere is all a tempest in a teapot.

Whatever the case, I expect more of these mini-freak-outs to come as Twitter continues to enforce its rules of the road. Just be sure to read the fine print first.

Update: As it turns out, Drew Olanoff over at TechCrunch noticed the same thing. Guess I’m not crazy.

Ticker image via AshDesign

On the “change” side, the Internet has disrupted and transformed business and society at a rate never seen before. Opportunities for start-ups are proliferating, while new infrastructure efficiencies eliminate start-up costs and barriers. On the “same” side, some basic fundamentals — market opportunity, a unique product or service that meets a real need, financial performance — remain constant, and straddling the two sides is the ever-present and ever-changing elephant of government regulation, about whose feet start-ups must dance.

New and old challenges remain daunting, but the scales are tipping in the direction of innovative technology start-ups that carefully plot and follow the right IPO roadmap. This is especially true for enterprise technology start-ups, which have been outperforming other newly public companies dramatically in the past year. While Facebook may have given the IPO market a black eye, it clearly wasn’t a knockout punch.

Proliferating Opportunities
Actually, the success of social networks and other cloud-based consumer services is creating opportunities for innovative companies, which can improve or better use the underlying infrastructure. A maturing cloud provides start-ups with a reliable and secure platform for using, developing and/or delivering software as a service (SaaS). The SaaS model eliminates the need to build out extensive IT facilities to support business processes and product development, greatly reducing capital requirements that have been a key barrier in pre-cloud times.

Start-ups still need plenty of capital, including public capital. However, a growing mass of regulations capped by Sarbanes-Oxley have successively crippled the U.S. IPO market and driven some IPO activity overseas. The London Stock Exchange openly promotes itself as a SOX-free zone, and IPOs on Chinese exchanges accounted for 40 percent of global IPO funds in 2011.

Parts of the JOBS Act of 2012 attempt to address this problem by improving the access emerging growth companies have to public capital markets. The rules are still being hammered out, but they have the potential to increase opportunities for start-ups and enable them to grow and prosper.

Consider the start-up that is exceeding expectations and posting impressive quarter-over-quarter growth, and yet rejects the notion of an IPO because of crushing compliance costs, a lack of analyst coverage and/or highly regulated communications protocols. The JOBS Act, combined with streamlined IPO preparation processes and more highly evolved IPO best practices, is expected to encourage such start-ups to rethink the IPO option.

Enduring Fundamentals
Despite all the dizzying change, a technology start-up’s IPO roadmap is built upon some basic fundamentals that have endured longer than my own 20-year tenure as a venture capitalist. Simply put, the technology start-up’s IPO roadmap must address the size of the market being pursued; the quality and uniqueness of the products or services aimed at that market; the value proposition to the customer; and of course, financial performance.

The market opportunity. The potential market must be large enough to support plenty of competition, plenty of growth and plenty of staying power. Take mobile, a market sector that kept roaring along even at the very nadir of the current recession. Smartphones will soon be the top network access device, even for enterprises, and applications for them are proliferating at a staggering rate.

Another seemingly limitless market is software-defined networking, driven by the explosion in data and the demand for new systems to handle network traffic more efficiently. Start-up Arista’s approach to software-defined cloud networking solutions for large data center and high-performance computing environments features its own Extensible Operating System and got it ranked as the #1 software company Cisco should fear.

Quality and uniqueness. The start-up’s product or service must stand out from the crowd with its quality and uniqueness. And since quality and uniqueness aren’t static, the company’s executive team must possess the knowledge, expertise and vision to evolve its products or services accordingly. Take Cyan Inc., which has developed unique Service Level Aware networking technology that enables network providers to get more out of their existing infrastructures. Pure Storage is another example of a company that is focused on quality and uniqueness. By developing an all-flash approach to the enterprise storage market, the company delivers fast, high capacity systems that are getting traction: the company has shipped more than 100 systems and has deployments over 250 TBs in size.

The value proposition. Start-ups must identify the pain points in the potential customer base, and provide relief with appropriate products and services. Few concerns consistently cause more pain than security issues, so FireEye developed a security appliance that goes way beyond traditional threat protection. Instead of reactively using filters based on known threats, FireEye proactively looks for patterns that point to new ones. Box has tackled another challenging issue: content sharing and collaboration across distributed, remote and mobile organizations. By taking consumer-like approach to an enterprise challenge, Box is shaking up a very traditional market and demonstrating real value.

Financial performance. Ideally, the start-up is growing rapidly, with recurring revenue, increasing earnings, high margins, and little or no debt. Profitability isn’t an absolute requirement, but negative profits — the rate at which the start-up is burning through its funding — shouldn’t be too high. Start-ups can and do go public successfully before they are generating any profits, but this deficit should be offset by the size of the market opportunity and the magnitude of the company’s competitive advantage.

These companies are still traveling down private roads, guided by the IPO roadmap. Splunk and Palo Alto Networks are two start-ups who followed this IPO roadmap to successful public offerings earlier this year.

Splunk, which went public a month before Facebook, is a data analytics specialist addressing key challenges in the huge and critical Big Data market. The start-up produces unique and highly effective tools that help enterprises collect and index data on a massive scale, and then make sense of it.

Palo Alto Networks, which went public July 20 in the wake of the Facebook disappointment, is an innovator in the perennially hot enterprise network security sector.

Powered by the Enterprise Engine
Timing can make or break a public offering, and the right timing only looks like luck. Precise timing is based upon the ability to identify evolving market trends and know just when to catch the waves they generate.

Right now, the resurgence of the enterprise is creating a veritable tsunami. As consumer internet companies with charismatic leaders bask in the limelight, technology start-ups quietly focusing on enterprise needs are heating up everything from Big Data to cyber security.

In June, Thomson Reuters analyzed VC-funded technology IPOs from the past year and found that the top five performers were enterprise software and service providers. The valuation of each was up at least 65 percent from its strike price.

This trend appears to be continuing in the second half of 2012, beginning with the aforementioned IPO home run hit Palo Alto Networks. The following week, software-defined networking pioneer Nicira opted for the acquisition route and was bought by VMware for $1.2 billion.

The Road Ahead
Venture capital firms with deep pockets continue to invest in companies that qualify for the IPO fast track. These start-ups don’t tend to need as much, because enterprise technology isn’t nearly as capital-intensive as it once was. Today’s start-ups are also using web technologies to bring products to market and build customer bases.

The fast track is being greased by several factors. We have learned a lot about the IPO process and streamlined it considerably. Start-ups no longer have to shell out $1 million plus just to get all the requisite documents prepared. Best practices have emerged, and our experiences have taught us a lot about timing.

History shows us that economic downturns put a premium on innovation, which today means big opportunities for enterprise technology start-ups. Enterprises must do more with less, by ratcheting automation up to new levels and into new dimensions. Start-ups that can come up with solutions to these problems are following a proven IPO roadmap to successful public offerings.

Disclosure: FireEye and Cyan are in the NVP investment portfolio.

Promod Haque has more than 20 years of experience in the venture capital industry and currently serves as managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).

Wouldn’t it be nice, for example, if, while you were on hold, that otherwise pointless disembodied voice greeted you by name, reassured you that you’re going to be connected to someone who knows exactly what your problem is and how to deal with it, and that it will only be a few more minutes because there is only one more person ahead of you?

If that sounds like some kind of utopian vision for the otherwise infuriating world of automated phone support, it’s not that far from reality. Remember Twilio? This is the company that lets you program your own phone system. It’s the one that makes all its employees create their own application as a way of making everyone familiar with the platform and also showing how easy it is to use.

So yesterday the company announced on its blog a new feature. The wonky software engineer word for it is a “primitive,” which means it’s a deeply fundamental command in an API. Whatever. The command is “Queue,” and what it does is allow companies using Twilio to program their own logical flow for managing people waiting on hold.

For instance, you might decide that when a customer calls in a second or third time within a certain period of time, that they’re having a serious problem. Since presumably you know their phone number from Caller ID, you might route their call directly to the guy who helped them before. Need to get someone else on the phone to help out? It’s easy to bridge the call and bring someone else in.

It’s the sort of thing that, when used creatively, can potentially speed up an otherwise unpleasant, time-consuming and costly process. When you get right down to it, no one on either side of the call really wants to be there, right?

I had a quick chat with Thomas Schiavone, product manager for voice at Twilio, earlier this week. He told me companies using Twilio had already been trying to do some of this using the existing commands in the API. Adding the new Queue command makes it easier, and requires fewer steps to get those things accomplished. “You could have built applications that do all this previously,” he told me. “But we’re making it easier for the developers so they have to do less.”

It’s just another example of how Twilio has been busy this year. In recent months, it has been adding support for international markets in Europe and also Israel. It has also been hiring new senior execs at a fair clip: A CFO in May and before that a CMO in April. Lots of interesting customers, too, including Intuit, eBay and Sony.

Well, it wasn’t as tasty as free food this week at Yahoo, but in her second official all-hands meeting with employees — now reportedly called “Friday FYI” — new CEO Marissa Mayer rolled out another new Google-inspired Q&A tool to get the company talking about what matters.

The system allows anyone at the Silicon Valley Internet giant to post questions, ideas or suggestions on a variety of topics, which can then be voted up and down.

Actually, it’s been in use internally at — you guessed it — Google for some time, and is even available to the general public in a product called Google Moderator. Mayer has been importing a lot of corporate practices from the search giant where she worked for her entire career — from free food to better swag to these weekly confabs to, now, its method of hearing from the staff.

While Yahoo previously used its Messenger product to garner questions for its less-regular all-hands meetings, this is apparently a new interactive tool built by the company’s engineers (and not using Google’s free APIs, as far as I can tell).

It seems to be working fine, and there were a number of questions that bubbled up.

That included one about Mayer’s thoughts on her current executive team — which is still largely inherited from a series of previous administrations, despite some departures recently — and also how her regime will hold them accountable.

Algorithmic accountability among Yahoo execs? Things have changed!

Even better, declared the questioner of that particular query, to whoops from the audience: “I want an honest answer!”

But Mayer was diplomatic, only saying she was “pleasantly surprised” by the top execs. She also noted that the management would have quarterly goals that are transparent to the whole company. (I won’t say they do that at Google, but — ahem — they do that at Google.)

Mayer went through a number of questions in a precise and cut-the-mustard manner that employees seem to be enjoying, overall.

One very voted-up question was about leaks to the media, in particular to this Web site, and whether a board mole hunt has been successful (obviously not). Also, of course, what she was going to do about the situation.

Apparently, Mayer said she won’t be tracking down leakers, and that this new openness will solve the problem.

Good idea, but all that lovely transparency also needs some pretty good products if it’s going to work.

And product focus most definitely appears to be the path now. Mayer also showed off the new Yahoo Mail — which has been under revamp for a while, and was started under former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving — with some good response from Yahoos (last week, it was a look-see at its recent iteration of its IntoNow video offering).

There are other interface changes that have been in the works too, likely under the direction of Tim Parsey, Yahoo’s head designer, who also came on under Irving.

In fact, a lot of what Irving had pushed, including keeping advertising technology in-house and also maintaining control of key monetization engines, is the likeliest path going forward. The ad tech outsourcing deals, pushed by the interim CEO and his strategy head Jim Heckman, are apparently gone (and so are Levinsohn and now Heckman).

Also of interest to many at the company is the increased involvement of co-founder David Filo, who has become much less quiet under Mayer. I’d expect him to report directly to her — he’s actually been reporting for years to a variety of product and tech execs, despite owning more than six percent of Yahoo.

Thus, here’s my question for the new Q&A system for next week: So, when’s Jerry Yang showing back up?

Upon its reception, most of the public attention focused on a single passage, which stated that Twitter will soon introduce stricter guidelines to its developer partners in the coming weeks, limiting the ways in which outsiders will be able to use Twitter’s rich, ceaseless stream of data.

This was a big deal. Countless numbers of smaller start-ups rely on access to Twitter’s public-facing feed, using the tweets in their own businesses for any number of reasons. If the terms of access were to be altered significantly, it could impact the livelihoods of thousands. The company didn’t elaborate on what exactly those guidelines would be, and has said little else since. The key takeaway echoed in one repeated word: Consistency. Twitter’s future plans strove for consistency across the platform.

Naturally, Twitter developers across the Web proceeded to freak out. Of the many third-party app developers I’ve spoken to who have massively popular apps that depend on Twitter, all of them have told me they have received no guidance from Twitter beyond Sippey’s original post.

While members of the press scramble to cover Twitter’s most recent dustup involving the censorship of a reporter, speculation in the developer community continues to run rampant, and many accuse Twitter of being unnecessarily opaque.

But amid the confusion of the past month, nearly all have overlooked the section of Sippey’s post which holds the key to Twitter’s future: Cards. Twitter’s new Cards technology allows third-party developers to create richer, more compelling — and, above all, visually consistent — content inside of Twitter itself.

Therein lies Twitter’s goal: A rich, consistent Twitter experience for every user. When the hammer drops and Twitter changes its guidelines, those apps that can’t deliver this consistency will no longer be able to integrate with Twitter. The most likely candidates to go first, according to multiple sources, fall into two camps: Third-party-client apps which essentially reduplicate the Twitter stream — such as Tweetbot, Echofon and Osfoora — and news reader apps like Flipboard, which re-renders Twitter data to create a different visual experience of a tweet entirely.

The answer lies in the cards.

Cards on the Table

The mandate to crack down on developers comes straight from Dick Costolo — no doubt feeling the pressure of being the company’s third CEO in almost as many years — who is charged with the task of making profitable a company backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital and valued near $8 billion (see Googler Hunter Walk’s excellent post for more on this). Right now, Cards are the long-term bet in continuing to bolster monetization efforts.

First, let’s back up a bit. What are Twitter Cards, exactly?

In effect, they are the technology behind expanded, multimedia-rich tweets. With the addition of a few lines of code, publishers, brands and developers can create better tweets showcasing their content inside of the Twitter stream. For example, when sites like AllThingsD and the New York Times tweet a link to a story, a “summary” Card shows a fancier version, like so:

Developers can also push out media-based tweets, which include full photos and video that show up inside Twitter’s stream.

Though any developer may apply to use Cards, currently only major publishers — like the New York Times, the Huffington Post, CNET and others — big brands like Nike and Nascar, and high-profile media apps like Instagram and YouTube are able to take advantage of it. Twitter is restricting access initially, working with select partners on a slow, cautious rollout.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Right now, it rests on these developers’ shoulders to make their Card-enabled tweets work across official Twitter clients: Twitter.com, the Twitter Android and iOS apps, and Twitter’s mobile Web site.

The problem is, there are far more clients than the official ones: Tweetbot, Echofon and Osfoora are all popular alternatives, among many others. And right now, the tweets that use Twitter’s shiny new Card technology don’t show up in their rich new form inside of these third-party clients.

For Twitter, this is awful: The company needs its new, media-rich tweets to appear the same to everyone, not just to those using the official Twitter apps.

This could mean death for those third-party clients. According to multiple sources, when Twitter introduces the new set of API guidelines, the days of these apps are likely numbered.

That also goes for many news aggregation apps as well, according to my sources, with the very popular Flipboard being the most notable among them. The writing has been on the wall for Flipboard for some time — enough that Mike McCue, the Flipboard CEO who also occupied a seat on Twitter’s board, seemed likely to relinquish his board seat, back when Kara Swisher first reported it in May.

Multiple sources confirmed to me recently that McCue is indeed no longer a Twitter board member.

Quality Control

Here comes the burning question: Why are Cards and visual consistency so important to Twitter? Is Twitter’s obsession with good design so extreme that it is willing to risk alienating its developer community at large?

In three words: No, but sorta. This section from Sippey’s post gives us a further hint at the “why”:

“Twitter cards are an important step toward where we are heading with our platform, which involves creating new opportunities to build engaging experiences into Twitter. That is, we want developers to be able to build applications that run within Tweets.” (emphasis mine)

Building apps to run inside a platform. Sound like any other major social companies you’ve heard of?

Yes, it does: Cards are Twitter’s own version of a Facebook-like Open Graph. Just as developers’ apps look, feel and function better when integrated into Facebook’s Open Graph, third-party developers can use the Twitter Cards technology to build apps into Twitter. As Sippey alludes, pictures and media are just the beginning: Twitter wants developers to create all kinds of apps — it just wants them to do it on Twitter’s terms, inside Twitter’s visual constraints.

Indeed, while Sippey’s post read as a warning shot — which, to some degree, it certainly was — it is also a call to arms for developers to take to Twitter’s platform in a different way than they have before. Twitter even plans to amp up its efforts in bolstering its developer ranks, listing multiple developer evangelist and advocate positions on its recruiting site.

The direction in which tweets are evolving is a deviation from Twitter’s modus operandi. The company has prided its service on its simplicity: Stripped-down, text-only messages. And, for years, Twitter has resisted doing anything that would complicate the simplistic appeal. For the company to give an about-face and turn toward media is a major sea change — and if Twitter can’t be as simple as it always has been, staying consistent is the next best sort of insurance.

And if these other unofficial clients can’t (or won’t) use Cards, that cuts Twitter’s plan off at the knees.

Promote This

Looking good has its advantages: Better-looking tweets will send more traffic back to publishers and more eyeballs to brands, while Twitter users get the benefit of a better in-stream experience.

But that’s not all Twitter gains. Rich tweets give brands more bang for their buck when buying Twitter ads. Take Promoted Tweets, one of Twitter’s top ad products, as an example: A regular Promoted Tweet gets pinned within users’ streams, where users may or may not click on it. But if you compare that with a Promoted Tweet that includes an embedded, custom-made app or video clip inside of it, my guess is you’ll see engagement levels rise in the latter case. Give advertisers the chance to stick more bells and whistles into their ad, and it’s an easier sell.

Right now, Twitter is taking a conservative rollout approach, partnering with a handful of high-profile developers to create a fancy first round of well-produced tweets. It’s akin to mobile app Path’s recent approach with its Nike FuelBand integration — Path worked with one partner to produce one well-integrated partner experience within the Path app.

And herein lies the advantage of reining in the platform: The less room Twitter gives developers to play with the API willy-nilly, the easier it is for Twitter to create better experiences within Twitter.

In other words, enough building innovation out — it’s time to innovate in.

Choices

The road ahead is foggy. And it is unclear whether Twitter’s API changes to come will immediately ax a wide swath of apps completely, or whether developers will be able to adjust to Twitter’s new rules of the road. Perhaps if Twitter can give developers the proper guidance, it won’t be a third-party-app bloodbath.

I’ve been told by a few sources that even Twitter is still figuring this out. Right now, a source says, the company is facing a series of choices as it stares down the path it has chosen.

Some of those choices are easy: Ending the LinkedIn partnership was a no-brainer, sources say, as Twitter received little traffic back from those tweets syndicated in LinkedIn’s stream. (It should have ended much earlier, I’m told, but the occasional quick phone call from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner had a way of convincing Dick Costolo to keep the partnership in place.)

Instagram, which will most likely soon become property of Facebook (after the FTC gives the okay), was also an easy choice, sources say. Facebook is Twitter’s competition for ad sales, plain and simple. Coupled with the social graph, any access Facebook has to Twitter’s interest graph could make Facebook’s ad targeting exponentially better, and therefore far more lucrative for advertisers. (It also probably didn’t hurt that Facebook set the precedent of cutting off its competitors when it did the exact same thing to Twitter years ago.)

Other decisions — like cracking down on developers and third-party apps who until now have enjoyed positive relationships with Twitter — most likely won’t be so easy for the company to make.

But Twitter has proven tough thus far, and is most likely to continue taking flak to see its plans through.

Meanwhile, Twitter runs the risk of watching developers depart the platform, perhaps seeking refuge in alternatives like Facebook or — dare I say it — Google+. There’s even a new kid on the block that aims to do it a better way, opting to build a real-time platform like Twitter, wholly unsupported by ads. Dalton Caldwell, a Silicon Valley familiar, has pitched App.net as a paid service for app developers who don’t want the pressure of advertisers bearing down on the network over time. It is ambitious, and idealistic in the extreme (perhaps, many would say, to its own detriment).

Or, developers can continue to do what they’ve been doing: Watch, wait, and let the cards fall where they may.

This much is clear, as Twitter rolled out a new feature focused on ticker symbols on Monday evening, allowing users to search for tweets that mention particular stocks. So for example, if a tweet contains the symbol $GE, clicking on the ticker will serve up a list of all the recent tweets that contain the $GE ticker.

Why is this a foul? Mostly because this is one of the primary functions of Stock Twits, the pet project of entrepreneur Howard Lindzon. Sign in to Stock Twits using your Twitter account, and users can follow different companies based on the $ticker that Lindzon popularized.

“In a dirty way, it’s the ultimate compliment,” Lindzon wrote on his site.

Lindzon maintains that while Twitter is playing dirty with the creation of the “cashtag,” he says his service provides enough context and community to differentiate itself from Twitter’s newly incorporated feature. Further, since Lindzon has spent the past four years developing his site, he believes he has a better handle on dealing with “cashtags” than Twitter does.

“You can hijack a plane but it does[n't] mean you know how to fly it,” Lindzon wrote.

The timing is too interesting not to notice. Twitter is in the midst of platform flux, moving towards a new way of dealing with third-party developers on its platform. A vaguely worded, highly publicized Twitter blog post from last month hinted that changes would be coming, though the company hasn’t released any further information. Instead, developers are paying attention to Twitter’s actions; the company clamped down on Instagram’s API access last week, and cut LinkedIn off completely a few weeks ago.

Granted, it’s one feature from the many other user interface additions that Lindzon’s start-up offers; to say that Twitter is completely moving in on and ready to take over the financial tweet territory forged by Lindzon four years ago may be something of a stretch.

Still, Lindzon claims Twitter was uninterested in this sort of move as recently as a few months ago. Now, apparently, that isn’t the case.

While Instagram users can still tweet their photos out to their Twitter streams, they can no longer use the feature to add those they already follow on Twitter to their Instagram account.

Why? It could be because of an old beef with Facebook.

If you’ll recall, Facebook blocked Twitter’s API access way back in 2010, when Twitter created its own “Find Your Friends” feature to help users follow their existing Facebook friends on Twitter. Though the Face-tagram acquisition has yet to even close, it could be that Twitter is preparing for what may be inevitable — the day when Instagram becomes a part of Facebook.

The restrictions also come in the wake of a controversial recent blog post from product VP Michael Sippey, broadly sketching a future Twitter where its API will look much different than it does today. “In the coming weeks,” Sippey wrote, “we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.”

But while that note foretells of a sweeping API sea change, the Instagram smackdown portends of something much more targeted, a slap back at its major competitor.

Twitter’s official response was effusive, yet blunt: “We understand that there’s great value associated with Twitter’s follow graph data, and we can confirm that it is no longer available within Instagram,” a spokesperson told me in a statement.

Think about it in terms of Twitter’s conspicuous “value” comment: What is Twitter giving away to Instagram, a potential future competitor, in this instance? Something as simple as boosting engagement inside of Instagram by using Twitter’s API to onboard followers may not be quantifiable “value” in terms of dollars, but it is valuable, for certain.

Facebook had no comment, as indeed the deal has not gone through yet. Instagram, too, had no comment.

The pawn in all of this — albeit a massively popular, extremely valuable pawn — is Instagram, which must suffer a reduced feature set while waiting in limbo for the Facebook purchase to go through. That’s probably why, instead of sweeping the loss of the “Find Your Friends” feature under the rug, Instagram made it a point to deliver a prompt to users, letting them know exactly what they lost:

“Twitter no longer allows its users to access this information in Instagram via the Twitter API,” the prompt states. “We apologize for any inconvenience.”

It’s basically Instagram waving a giant middle finger back in Twitter’s face, making Twitter look like the bad guy.

The real loser here? The unassuming new Instagram user, who won’t be able to take advantage of the feature.

In my conversations with people in and around Pinterest, it has been clear that the 40-person company is adding these features as quickly as it can hire and build — all the while keeping up with demand.

But I’ve also been warned that, like many of the products its users save, Pinterest wants its products to feel handcrafted and unique, so it may be a bit slower than some might hope.

So what’s next for Pinterest?

Android: Pinterest showed off its Android app for phones and tablets this week at Google I/O. The new app will feature pinning from other apps on the phone and a multicolumn design (the iPhone version is more self-contained and only has one column). Developer Carl Rice, who joined Pinterest in April, told me that the app would be released later this summer. (That’s me, pictured at right, holding the latest version on a Nexus 7.)

Internationalization: This morning, Pinterest released some of the first translated versions of its site in Iberian Spanish and Brazilian (following American English and Latin American Spanish). Fast internationalization is an increasingly pressing problem for buzzy start-ups, because they face clones earlier than ever.

That was also part of the justification for the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten becoming Pinterest’s latest lead investor. Insiders told me that Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann was particularly interested in the Japanese market because of its aesthetic focus, which he felt aligns well with the site.

iPad: Want to look at big photos of pretty things? Yup.

Open sign-ups: Pinterest still doesn’t allow new users to register for the site; they have to register to request an invite. It’s part of the mystique, sure, but it’s not key to Pinterest’s product, and it certainly inhibits growth. That has mostly been a way to meter access and defend against spam.

But it can be awkward and annoying. Imagine, for instance, that you’re not a registered Pinterest user, but you’re checking out Facebook and see something posted by a friend from Pinterest that you like. You click to get to the site, but are told you can’t get in. You sign up, then you wait a day or so, then you get an email, then you redeem that email while making sure you don’t lose your code. And where were you again? Not on Pinterest.

API: Pinterest is “actively working to make the API available soon,” according to Cat Lee from the platform team on Quora.

Private boards: Right now, all Pinterest activity is public. The company has indicated that will change in the future — for instance, to allow someone to plan a surprise party or save pictures of wedding dresses where the groom can’t see. In March, Pinterest telegraphed the introduction of private boards with new terms of service and privacy policies.

Search: Pinterest may be more of a discovery site, but its search is really not very good.

Attribution and sourcing: Pinterest benefits from the free sharing of images, but it doesn’t want to get in trouble with copyright owners. It has recently introduced attribution for specific sites, and it seems likely that the company will soon work on better ways to capture more metadata.

And while we’re on the topic, there was a suggestion earlier this week that Pinterest had overtaken Tumblr’s traffic in the U.S. (The sites aren’t direct competitors, but they both cater to visual and easy self-expression.)

Since the estimate from Pingdom was based on extrapolated data, I asked comScore for its actual traffic measurement of Tumblr and Pinterest in the U.S. and worldwide.

ComScore replied that Tumblr still has the edge, though it’s close in the U.S. As of May, Pinterest had 20.3 million U.S. monthly unique visitors, while Tumblr had 25.3 million.

Worldwide, Pinterest had 31.9 million uniques in May, while Tumblr had 69.7 million.

But there is still value in being exclusive.

Path, for instance, is perhaps a prime example of this. It has an API, though it currently only has a single announced partner: Nike. On Friday, the company announced a small update in the partnership, adding integration between Nike’s FuelBand fitness tracking bracelet and the private social network. Path publishes a summary of your FuelBand activity in the form of an interactive graph at the end of each day, complete with included data points on where and when you’ve checked in using Path.

Ultimately, the aim is a mix of motivation and geeking out on data — you can see how close you’ve come to your daily exercise goal, while simultaneously tracking all the places, activities and reasons why you achieved it (or why you didn’t). It’s incremental, building on the previously announced partnership between the two companies when Path first started publishing Nike+ running route updates.

However small an update, it’s also an indicator of Path’s API partnership strategy as a whole. When Path first spoke of its API, the plan wasn’t to open it up to the masses — it was, and remains, a private API, with partners selected in terms of which ones make sense for the company to work with, and which ones make for a better user experience.

“We want to improve the experience for the collective users of both apps,” Path CEO Dave Morin told me in an interview on Thursday, “which is why we’re selective about who we’re partnering with.”

That selectivity means more time is spent on the integration, making the content in a user’s stream actually more attractive. The new FuelBand graphs are sleek, offering users granular information about their fitness activity in a polished interactive graphic. That’s more than can be said for some apps that show up in Facebook’s News Feed, even after Open Graph integration.

“We’re driven by quality,” Morin said. “We’re driven by design.”

And ultimately, the better and prettier the content is that shows up in the stream, the more users will actually want to engage with the product on a regular basis. Quality begets stickiness, and stickiness begets a company with a better chance at surviving.

We’ll no doubt see more companies partnering with Path in the future. My hunch says it’ll be a slow, steady ramp up over time, with Path being selective about who it wants to work with.

The lawsuit between Oracle and Google over the use of Java in Android is in the books, and while Oracle scored some points and prevailed on at least one narrow point of the dispute, as time has run out, the scoreboard is lopsided in Google’s favor.

Initially billed as the “World Series of intellectual property cases,” this trial had lots of bold-faced names on the witness stand, including Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Google CEO Larry Page, plus Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz, both former CEOs of Sun Microsystems.

After the jury had its say, William Alsup came back with a ruling that Oracle cannot apply copyright protection to Java APIs. This was by far the most controversial and wide-ranging portion of Oracle’s case, one that had software developers around the world kind of worried that it might prevail. It didn’t, but Oracle has promised to appeal Alsup’s ruling.

Below is a copy of Judge William Alsup’s final order in the case, spelling it all out. You’ll notice that in the portion of the case concerning nine lines of code on which Oracle did prove that its copyright was infringed, no money is changing hands. Oracle was technically entitled to some low-six-figure sum of damages for the infringement. But my understanding is that by agreeing to zero damages now, it’s simply speeding up the process that will lead to an appeal. So while it’s over, it’s really not.

Final Order

Back in early May we reported that WWDC would see the debut of a brand-new “blow your head off” Apple-developed mapping application. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal confirmed this. So we can almost certainly expect a new Maps application to be part of Monday’s presentation. Also a near-sure thing: A new MacBook Pro with a significantly thinner chassis and high-resolution “Retina-esque” display, as we previously reported.

But what else might we see?

During the opening night session at D10 last week, Cook’s comments about Facebook strongly suggested that the announcement of some manner of iOS integration with the social networking service — similar to the one Apple has already done with Twitter — could be on tap. As Cook said, when asked about such a deal at D10, “Stay tuned on this one.” Does that comment mean that iOS 6, which Apple plans to show off at WWDC, will have Facebook baked in? Certainly possible, as other have claimed.

Another likely possibility: New Macs. We’ve been hearing chatter about a refresh of most of Apple’s Mac lines for some time now. Yesterday, 9to5Mac reported that Apple has new versions of the MacBook Air, the iMac and perhaps the Mac mini and/or Mac Pro, the last of which is long overdue for an update. We haven’t been able to confirm this report independently, but it, too, sounds entirely plausible. MacBook Airs have not seen a refresh since July 2011. And the last MacBook Pro refresh was a relatively minor one in October.

Also possible: Deeper native integration of iCloud into OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6. As I wrote when iCloud first launched, “If, as Steve Jobs says, software is the soul of Apple’s products, hardware their brains and sinew, then iCloud is their memory — and soon perhaps one of their biggest selling points as well. Certainly it’s a feature that will differentiate Apple’s already well-differentiated products even further from the competition.” ICloud may not be a major driver of customer loyalty now, but with its ease of use and promise of change-on-one-device, update-to-all computing, it will be, someday. And it’s been about a year since iCloud debuted, so it, too, is due for an update.

What else? APIs for iCloud and Siri, perhaps. Apps for Apple TV, or a broader enhancement to the device that paves the way for a more comprehensive TV offering. As Tim Cook noted at D10, Apple’s Apple TV business has grown quite a bit in the past year. In 2011, the company sold fewer than three million Apple TVs. In the first six months of this year, it has sold 2.7 million. As Cook told D attendees, “This is an area of intense interest for us. We’re going to keep pulling the string and see where it takes us.”

Perhaps WWDC attendees will get a chance to see, as well. We’ll find out on Monday.

Of the two, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s last CEO, spent the most time on the witness stand. Called by lawyers for Google, he bolstered Google’s argument that it was free to use parts of Java as it assembled its Android mobile operating system.

Scott McNealy, called by Oracle, said it was Sun’s practice to let other companies use Java, but only with a commercial license, the primary requirement of which was that the licensee ensure that Java remain compatible.

While numerous other phones from the likes of Nokia, Research In Motion and Motorola were compatible with Java applications, those on Android weren’t. Compatibility is one of the main points over which Oracle has been arguing with Google. Oracle contends that not only did Google violate its patents and copyrights, but it then went on to build its own incompatible version of Java, fracturing one of the oldest premises of Java’s existence: Write once, run anywhere.

Schwartz said he had hoped that Google would take out a commercial license, but in the end, he said, according to a report on CNet News, Sun opted “to grit our teeth” and support it as part of the Java community. He said that he opted not to sue Google over the issue.

Oracle also presented as evidence an email from Schwartz, describing Google as having taken Java “without attribution or contribution,” and then went on: “This is why I love scroogle,” referring to a now-defunct Web-search service that served up Google-like search results anonymously. See it below.

(c) Tim Vetter / Flickr

This last weekend, Foursquare founder Naveen Selvadurai announced in a blog post that he was leaving the company, three years after launching the check-in service with Dennis Crowley. In a terse note, Sevaldurai wrote that he would remain on the company’s board and as an adviser, as well as the “single most vocal user” of the popular check-in service.

But, he added, “spring is time for things that are new, and i realize that i have a desire to do something new as well. i’m not sure about my exact next steps.”

Spring forward indeed, because — according to numerous sources inside and outside the company — the impetus for Selvadurai’s departure was a lot more complex and fraught than he or the company indicated.

To be fair, this is not uncommon for start-ups at all. Twitter went through the mother of all contentious partings — twice, in fact — in an ongoing battle among its founders. Tech is rife with similar examples, most often of lesser drama.

And it is much the same with Selvadurai and Crowley, who had together become New York’s highest profile entrepreneurs in recent years. The pair cut a wide swatch of fame, including doing commercials together (see video below).

But times change and sources said that they had come to the conclusion over a series of talks over the last several months that there was no place for Selvadurai any longer at the fast-growing start-up.

“This company grew very quickly and a lot of senior management has been added,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “It got to the point where Naveen was not in charge of much.”

Indeed, since Foursquare began adding execs — I have a list below — he had become ever more sidelined, ending up with a small team focused on platform efforts and supporting APIs.

“Naveen was no longer heading any meaningful area of functional responsibility, so things got tense,” said another source.

Still, according to several people familiar with the situation — unlike the highly charged parting that took place at Twitter — the departure was not ugly or closely related to either a recent stock sale by employees or its most recent funding in June that valued Foursquare at $600 million.

“Dennis and he don’t hate each other — things just changed,” said one person.

Said another source: “When you look at all the external stuff, Naveen’s leaving was really not tied to anything in particular. The business was really starting to mature … and there is eventually a line in the sand between building a product and building a company.”

Indeed, rather than a scrappy start-up, Foursquare now has 111 employees, up from 50 last year, and has moved into a new phase of trying to evolve from simply being a check-in service.

As that was happening, said multiple sources, the discussions about roles at the company became more pronounced.

“The way this company has been structured, the talks centered on how to contribute to a company and Naveen and Dennis agreed that there was not a place for him day to day,” said one person. “But that does not mean he still will not be contributing to the future of Foursquare in a different way.”

The pair both emailed Foursquare’s staff about the change, although Crowley’s public goodbye on Twitter was short and, yes, sweet:

After 3 yrs, my @foursquare co-founder is moving onto new projects & big ideas. Can’t wait to see what’s next @naveen! naveenium.com/stream/next

— Dennis Crowley (@dens) March 5, 2012

Like I said: Things change.

Here’s the current Foursquare management team:

Dennis Crowley, CEO & co-founder
Evan Cohen, COO (joined January 2010)
Holger Luedorf, head of business development (joined summer 2010)
Alex Rainert, head of product (joined April 2010)
Harry Heymann, head of engineering (joined summer 2009)
Susan Loh, head of talent (joined fall of 2010)
Jon Steinback, director of marketing and communications (joined fall of 2010)

And here are some of the latest stats from the service:

* Over 15 million users (up from just over five million this time last year).

* Over 1.5 billion check-ins.

* Five million check-ins per day.

* Over 750,000 businesses affiliated.

And here’s the video that Foursquare’s co-founders did together for USA Network last year:

Image: (c) Tim Vetter / Flickr