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Last week brought two major announcements from Twitter. On Thursday, the company announced an official application for BlackBerry. On Friday, Twitter announced that it had purchased Atebits, the makers of the iPhone app Tweetie . Over the weekend, there was substantial discussion and a fair amount of hand-wringing by third-party developers, many expressing their frustrations about the company’s direction. Attempting to reassure developers in advance of next week’s Chirp conference, Twitter API lead Ryan Sarver responded by email to some of these concerns. Sponsor Certainly Twitter isn’t the only company at the center of debates about control of a platform (Apple, Google, and Microsoft come to mind), but in light of the flurry of responses to Twitter’s moves, it is worth considering some of the (perhaps contradictory) lessons for startups that can be gleaned from the past week’s events. Find your niche : Much of the third-party development on Twitter has served to address gaps in the original product: mobile clients, URL shorteners, photo sharing, and search for example. As VC and Twitter investor Fred Wilson argued in a blog post early last week that tipped the hand, perhaps, to where Twitter was headed, there is still room for the development of “killer apps” in social gaming, enterprise, and analytics. Innovate and adapt : Find your niche, but then be prepared to innovate and adapt. Some have suggested that Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie might not bode well for other Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck , unless the two can continue to innovate. By adding new features unavailable via the Twitter website, and by linking streams from Facebook and LinkedIn, they have established themselves as more than just a Twitter client – but the pressure is certainly on for these to continue to distinguish themselves from the official Twitter applications. “Of course we’re hole fillers,” Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur admits , explaining that while that’s a good place to start, it isn’t the right place to end. Look beyond the platform : As Mark Suster writes of both Twitter and the iPhone, it is important to think beyond the platform, contending that startups should not think of Twitter “as a business but rather as a channel.” In other words, a platform like Twitter should be a used as a way to reach customers but, unless you’re Twitter, should not be the vehicle itself. If this is the ” inflection point ” for Twitter, the tasks for startups will be to learn the lessons from this critical juncture in the platform’s history, balancing the sometimes contradictory needs for specificity and flexibility and innovation and stability. Discuss

A Startup Toolkit reader wrote asking “Should I buy the email list of a local business in my industry that’s going out of business?” My initial gut feeling was “No,” as they didn’t generate the list, and it’s not a good idea to “drop in unannounced.” I like to bounce these things off people in the industry first, so I contacted Keith Moore, Chief Marketing Officer at iContact. Keith agreed, “If you want to utilize a list, have the owner handle sending a mailing on your behalf. You don’t have the trust and understanding of another firm’s customer.” So, my reader could work with the list owner to create an agreed-upon note that would introduce the competing service, and invite the current customers to join in. Keith and I discussed the best practices involved. “Have the invitation go to a page on the company site where you can invite them to your list.” It has to be a normal, opt-in form. “Good mailing list management means always being clear and upfront with your customers. Don’t abuse the right to email them, and you’re more likely to keep them as happy customers.” The other question the reader had was “How much do I pay for the list?” My suggestion was “Pay for success.” In other words, if the list has 5,000 people on it, don’t pay for all of them. Let the going-out-of-business company send a mailing or two. Most email list software can let you segment your responses into a new list. Count the customers that are still with you in a month or two, and pay for those that are now your customers. Now you’ve gotten some valuable, opt-in customers, and you can give back some consideration to the person who provided the leads. Base the compensation around what your current cost of email acquisitions are. If you don’t know that number, think about a cost to get people to sign up at an event or trade show in your industry. Make sure the person with the list is comfortable with your calculation and your proposal. And good luck. What’s your email acquisition strategy? Let us know.

When people talk about managing communities in this new online world, one name is mentioned more often and with more respect than any other: Heather Champ of Flickr . Today Champ announced that after nearly 5 years and more than 4 billion photos uploaded, she is leaving Flickr to start a community management consultancy called Fertile Medium . Flickr went from a Canadian social gaming company in 2004 to a photo sharing service to a Yahoo! acquisition in 2005. 3 years ago next month, Yahoo! shut down its giant Yahoo! Photos service and moved everyone over to Flickr instead. Sponsor Champ put her work in perspective on a blog post that included the following: “How do you take a community the size of small town to the size of a nation? How do you grow a site that began in one region and make it truly global by adding languages and localizing in what’s now 25 countries? How do you apply a content filtering system to a living site to ensure that members can be respectful of one another but still share the greatest variety of content? These are some of the big hairy challenges.” Just as most of Yahoo! has, Flickr has seen budget challenges as well. A substantial number of the Flickr team members were laid off one year ago this month . Facebook has long been larger and now sees almost an entire Flickr’s-worth of photos (3 billion) uploaded to that social network every month. As Facebook pushes its users more and more public with their content, it would be well served by paying attention to what Champ did at Flickr. The succinct and oft-learned from community guidelines at Flickr are among the work that Champ says she has been most proud of. Those challenges were experienced at Flickr in some of the earliest days of what’s now called “social media” and Champ helped forge best practices that have served as a foundation for communities all over the web ever since. Photo by Beth Kanter. Discuss

Early this morning, we received an announcement from Amazon the company is launching a pilot for EC2 customers to allow your enterprise organizations to move existing Microsoft Windows Server licenses to Amazon and receive a proper discount for the new EC2 instance. The offer is open until September and is being called a pilot by the companies to test the waters and pattern for hosting Windows within Amazon. Sponsor The note from Amazon is on the Windows Server license mobility prompts immediate action: “Dear Amazon EC2 Customer, We are excited to announce the immediate availability of the Microsoft Windows Server® License Mobility Pilot, which enables customers with Microsoft Enterprise Agreements (EA) to migrate their existing Windows Server licenses to Amazon EC2. By moving existing licenses to the cloud, you can leverage licenses that you have already purchased to reduce your cost of running Windows On-Demand or Reserved Instances by up to 41%. Microsoft will stop accepting new enrollments for the pilot on September 23, 2010 so it is important to act quickly. To participate in this pilot, Microsoft requires that your company meet the following criteria: * Your company must be based (or have a legal entity) in the United States * Your company must have an existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) that is valid for a minimum of 12 months after your entry into the pilot * You must already have purchased Software Assurance from Microsoft for your EA Windows Server Enterprise, Datacenter, and Standard licenses * You must be an Enterprise customer (Academic and Government institutions are not covered by this pilot) Once you have enrolled in the pilot, you will be eligible to run your Windows Server licenses in Amazon EC2 for the next 12 months following your sign-up. You will still be responsible for maintaining the appropriate number of Client Access licenses and External Connector licenses needed to operate your EA Windows Server licenses. To learn more about this pilot or sign-up, please visit http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/windows-license-mobility-pilot . We hope that you take advantage of this new pilot!” By clicking that

Are babies naming start-ups? One writer over at GigaOm suspects that toddlers are lending a hand in creating a new naming convention for companies. In light of the recent launches of Gwabbit , a web-based contact syncing service, Kwedit , a virtual goods payment network, and a couple of start-ups dubbed Kadoo and Faroo, the writer acknowledges the difficulty in finding domain names, but feels the cute-levels of start-up monikers have reach an all-time high. “I carefully triple-check spelling as start-ups drop vowels,” the post says, and “when it comes to adding letters, I have a special disdain for the double-o.” The argument against the Startup Visa–and a rebuttal. Paris-based technology entrepreneur Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry came out swinging against the idea of the startup visa in Business Insider yesterday. Y Combinator’s Paul Graham first floated the idea, which would let foreign entrepreneurs launch in the US if they could raise enough money from investors, about a year ago. Now it’s a Senate bill. But Gobry says the Visa would rely too much on investors, who will likely wring what they can from this newfound leverage. And it could increase the risks by adding the possibility of getting kicked out of the country if you fail. But peHUB directed our attention to this even stronger rebuttal from K9 Ventures’ Manu Kumar. He argues that Graham’s proposal addresses government fears (about foreigners launching a company without the capital to do so) without financially burdening the startup. As for the investors manipulating their power, he argues, “Investors do *not* want to run your company. They simply want *you* to do it well.” Regarding risks, Kumar points out that nothing is stopping the recipients from applying for another Startup visa or even a jobs visa, if they fail the first time. Blog network close to selling for millions? PaidContent is reporting that Gothamist, the network of city blogs, is nearing a deal to sell to Cablevision-owned Rainbow Media for $5 million to $6 million . The New York Times reports that “inside Cablevision, Gothamist and its sibling blogs for cities like Washington and Los Angeles are seen as complementary to Rainbow’s AMC, IFC and Sundance cable channels.” How to survive a recall. We’ve written about how a recall in your industry can provide a small business with a great opportunity, but what if the recall strikes your company? For Cynthia Thomas, the trouble struck during her first year of operation (via CNN Money ). The owner of the Beaverton, Oregon-based toy company, Earth Friendly, discovered that due to a manufacturing flaw, pieces on some of the company’s all-natural toys (they have no plastic or lead in them) were coming unglued. Thomas immediately called the Consumer Product Safety Commission who confirmed that she would need to recall the toys. “It felt like the worst thing that could ever happen,” she recalls, but the company recovered with a relatively healthy 2009 and managed to expand its retail network through the Pacific Northwest. Google Cuts off China Site. The question of how to balance the enormous business opportunities in China with questions about piracy, human rights violations, and censorship has long been a tough one for entrepreneurs. (We’ve looked at both sides of the issue in the past.) Yesterday, Google shut off its Chinese site, Google.cn, and began redirecting users to its Hong Kong site, which is not censored by Beijing. However, as Inc. noted in its report yesterday, searches from mainland China were still being censored, and Google will continue to invest in its cell phone business in the country. Four ways to improve your financial projections. Trying to make meaningful financial projections for your business is never easy. In this economy, it’s next to impossible. Thankfully, Ken Kaufman at the OPEN Forum has some tips to improve your forecasts to help make planning a little bit easier and to give you a leg up on the competition. Among his suggestions, Kaufman recommends scaling your expenses along with your revenue growth and forecasting your balance sheet in addition to the profit and loss statement. Once you’ve done all that work, don’t let it go to waste. As Kaufman explains, “Nothing is worse than seeing a great set of projections completed and then set aside, never to be referenced again.” Be sure to compare your actual performance against the projections and analyze them to see which assumptions were off the mark. More from Inc. Magazine: Get this delivered to your inbox. Or get it on the Kindle Follow us on Twitter or Tumblr . Friend us on Facebook. Apply now for the 2010 Inc. 500|5000 .