So the day we here at Nambu honestly (and very foolishly it turns out) thought would never come has arrived: Twitter will be now developing, acquiring, and marketing official native Twitter applications, starting with the Blackberry, iPhone, iPad and OS X. Nambu is now faced with the irritating prospect of competing with the same platform it is currently focused on creating a unique OS X experience for.

For those of you that don’t follow the ins-and-outs of the Twitter ecosystem, Twitter announced late Friday afternoon (apparently so that as few people as possible would notice) that they are acquiring Tweetie, and will rebrand it as Twitter for iPhone, iPad, and OS X. It will become a free application.

We appreciate very much all the tweets of support we received over this past weekend after soliciting feedback. To clarify our position, development on Nambu for OS X will continue. We have lots of cool ideas for Nambu, of which Twitter is only one part, just the part we decided to start with. The long-term plan for Nambu OS X was never to be a Twitter-only client, so we are not as affected as much as many others are. We will be focused on other opportunities beyond Twitter much sooner then we were thinking necessary, or really desirable. Ideally one would nail one aspect of a product 100% first, and then extend horizontally or vertically. We will have to revise this typical formula somewhat, going forward.

And not that much has changed, really. For a long time now Twitter has had a love-hate attitude towards the more competent members of its developer community. It has openly favored some with endorsements and priceless free advertising, while others are ignored. Any Twitter-based service that is not a cute outlier, based on a single feature without much chance of ever making any money, was always viewed with envy and irritation. Any accolades paid to developers for helping create the value that is Twitter today, it is clear now that was only necessary lip-service paid at the time.

Twitter did have an implicit unspoken agreement with its developer community since its beginning, almost 4 years ago now, that they were focused on creating the platform itself, and we were to innovate around it. That implicit contract has now officially been broken, which is probably what lead them to sheepishly announce this change Friday afternoon at 4:00pm.

Rather than share revenue with its client developers with new advertising platforms or other revenue potential, which would have been my approach, Twitter has decided to claim it all for itself, starting with the iPhone and iPad. One of Twitter’s Directors, Fred Wilson, essentially told all developers this past week to transition to fringe, pointless hobby projects that have no real chance of substantially monetizing with known, proven business models. Anything that does, Twitter will again, not share with you, but take for itself 100%. At least they have now made this clear, which I actually do appreciate.

That said, it is still frustrating to be first up here, faced with competing directly with the platform vendor itself, instead of just indirectly with clear lines of differentiation. Twitter has always had a Twitter client, twitter.com, that competes with every other client. But as an official outright competitor with native applications combined with formidable unassailable advantages, such as the first point of user contact, private APIs, and the Twitter brand, many users will simply not find other alternatives no matter what we have or what we do.

Over the coming weeks we will therefore re-evaluate our currently ongoing development of Nambu for iPhone and iPad. iPhone applications need to be small, task-orientated applications based around single services. With an official, free Twitter application with Twitter’s brand, marketing and reach behind it, there seems little point to developing there, where aggregation or unique additions are limited by the devices themselves. In the same way we would not bother with a Facebook application for the iPhone, for obvious reasons, we will now very likely not bother finishing up our Twitter-focused versions of Nambu for iPhone or iPad.

And if you are a quality Twitter developer not really affected by this as ...