… or, Much Ado About Nothing. This story is generating some conversation this morning. A lot of it bordering on the WTF! side of the coin. Want Your Service Integrated With TweetDeck? It’ll Cost You A Cool $50,000 For the life of me, I don’t understand the problem. Having spent 20+ years in the development space this seems to me nothing more than a custom job. It’s a bit different insofar as the audience of the app goes, but it’s still custom work. A client of your software product wants you to add a feature or features. You settle on a price. Do the work and integrate the feature set. Client signs off on the work and pays. Everybody’s happy.
The two issues seem to surround the asking price and the possible favoritism for a particular service or client. And again, I say, where’s the problem? If a client doesn’t like the price for the work, negotiate it or move on. There are a lot of Twitter clients and TweetDeck won’t be the only one offering this. And as an aside on the price issue, $50,000 for all of those eyeballs seems like a pretty good deal.
As for showing favoritism for a particular service or client, welcome to the business world. It’s TweetDeck’s product. They can favor whoever they are so inclined to. If they only want two url shorteners in the product, who’s to say the others should be there as well? Granted, if you’re a TweetDeck user who is used to using a particular url shortener and all of a sudden it disappears, you’re not likely to be the happiest of campers. But you still have a choice. Use one of the supported shorteners or move on to another client. After all, it’s not as if TweetDeck cost you anything in terms of dollars and cents.
