Way back in February the writing was on the wall: Twitter would compete directly with third party developers who were creating Twitter apps. Twitter investor Fred Wilson reiterated that threat just a few days ago when he said most of the apps that third party developers had created were merely “filling holes,” not truly creating “something entirely new on top of Twitter.”

That sure sounds ominous. And then, BOOM. Twitter released its own Blackberry app and acquired Tweetie, which has a popular iPhone and desktop app. The threats are over, Twitter fired missiles at its developers.

Anyone who didn’t see this coming was in denial. Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur is one developer who sure didn’t see it coming (disclosure: I’m an investor in Seesmic):

Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur two weeks ago, answering questions on Formspring:

Q: The “general” thinking is that Twitter will either buy Seesmic, or launch their own Seesmic/Tweetdeck killer, since they’ll eventually need to earn revenue (unless Google acquires them). Thoughts?

Loic: none of that will happem, it would be a disaster for them to compete with their ecosystem, which drives 70% of their traffic

Q: Seesmic stepped away from their proprietary products (video) and latched onto TWITTER – but, isn’t it very dangerous to be 100% tied to a 3rd Party platform where you have no control? Does it worry you?

Loic: not at all, Twitter is very respectful of 3rd party apps and we’re also on Facebook and more social networks

Loic Le Meur yesterday:

I have to admit I was not expecting Twitter to step so fast in the mobile client race themselves competing so fast with its ecosystem…As long as we keep moving and innovating and both partners treat each other in a fair way, I think we will all be safe, the hole is big enough and there are many other holes.

Oops.

Twitter has just announced that it acquired Tweetie, the very popular and highly polished Twitter application for the iPhone . The application will now be called “Twitter for iPhone” and will drop from $2.99 to free, with developer Loren Brichter (who makes up the one-man startup Atebits) joining the Twitter mobile team. Twitter also plans to launch Twitter for the iPad, which Brichter will be involved with.

It’s a move that manages to be both jarring and unsurprising at the same time. Unsurprising, because Twitter investor Fred Wilson recently wrote that Twitter developers needed to stop “filling holes” in Twitter’s product and instead build entirely separate businesses. And just this morning, Twitter launched an official Twitter for BlackBerry application, so another mobile application shouldn’t come as much of a shock. And yet, the iPhone is a platform where Twitter has a very strong third party presence, and Twitter has no doubt been benefiting from the contributions of these developers. Tweetie is extremely polished and is arguably the best, but there are plenty of other quality applications that are getting hung out to dry. Still, a move like this seemed inevitable.

In a blog post announcing the news, Twitter CEO Evan Williams explains the logic: people are going to iTunes, searching for a Twitter application, and not finding one so they give up (this sounds like a problem with iTunes search, but perhaps people really just want to see ‘Twitter’ in the application’s title):

Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes AppStore revealed massive room for improvement. People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.

This all comes less than a week before Twitter’s developer conference, Chirp, where I suspect the company will try to steer developers down a path that they won’t be paving over any time soon.

Of note: Twitter’s post does not mention anything about the Tweetie desktop application, which is available exclusively for the Mac. Don’t be surprised if this becomes ‘Twitter For Mac’ eventually.

That didn’t take long. Two days ago, well known VC (and early Twitter investor) Fred Wilson wrote a post telling Twitter startups to stop filling holes in Twitter’s products and to instead look to launch killer apps that start entirely new businesses. That led some third party developers to question if Wilson was hinting that Twitter may start filling in these holes itself, displacing third party apps with official ones (he later said that while he was on the Twitter board, he didn’t know their plans). It looks like the concerned developers may have been right: today, Twitter has announced the launch of the “Official Twitter for BlackBerry App”, which can be downloaded at blackberry.com/twitter.

Now, we’ve known that this application was coming for a long time — we gave out beta keys and reviewed it in Feburary. But looking back, all of the language around this was that it was RIM’s application — RIM was the one pitching us on the news, and there wasn’t any mention that this was endorsed by Twitter. That’s no longer the case. In its blog post, Twitter says that it has been “working closely with RIM to deliver the official Twitter app…”.

This is important, because Twitter has long thrived on its developer community. Third party applications like Tweetie, Seesmic, TweetDeck, Twitterific, and many, many others have brought the service to the desktop and mobile platforms. And myriad Twitter-oriented image and link shortening services have taken off as well. If Twitter is going to start endorsing offical versions of these applications, you can expect some signficant backlash. Other BlackBerry Twitter apps included UberTwitter and Seesmic.

We’ve reached out to Twitter to ask if they have plans to endorse applications on other platforms.

Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are. My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn’t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn’t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.

We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business — just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simons (Def Jam founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)

Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.

There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).

What did affect their successes?  Education — but not the college they graduate from. In a different study of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn’t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.

The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at “teachable moments” — when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn’t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge.  That’s why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.

One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth “scale” businesses. These new firms, especially the “scale” firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups.  After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.

That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs.  This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with “scalable ideas” can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator on steroids.

Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don’t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path — which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.

The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, “Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition”. The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population – a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Here’s a good virtual parlor game. Pick any two or three Twitter users, and Twiangulate which friends or followers they have in common. Twiangulate is a site that shows the overlap between your social graph and any tow other people on Twitter. It shows the resulting names as a list or an interactive social map.

For instance, if you click on the image at right, you will see an enlarged version of a map I made to see who I follow in common with @fredwilson and @anildash. Fred Wilson follows 463 people, Anil follows 573, and I follow 315. Yet according to Twiangulate, we have 81 common “friends,” which perhaps says something about how insular the world of Web startups and social media can be. In contrast, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and I only have 15 common “friends.”

So who are some of the people Fred, Anil, and I all listen to on Twitter? Some of the common people we follow include Josh Kopelman, Chris Dixon, John Borthwick, Dennis Crowley, Doc Searls, Steve Case, Joshua Schachter, Danny Sullivan, Bradley Horowitz, Michael Arrington, and Jeff Jarvis.

Are we listening to the right people or do we suffer from groupthink? Who do you overlap with the most on Twitter?

Topping the list is First Round Capital, with 31,632 average monthly uniques. Sequoia Capital, which sports a very spare look on its site with only a searchbox and four faint links underneath (“U.S.,” “Very Early,” “Early,” and “Growth”), has the second-most popular site with 22,441 average monthly uniques.  Rounding out third place is Bessemer Venture Partners with 14,825 average monthly uniques. In order to make the list, the firm’s website had to have monthly unique data from Compete for October, November, and December 2009. Volition Capital averaged the traffic and ranked 150 VC firm sites. Of course, the traffic stats are just one benchmark of popularity, but Cheng did say he will be updating the list quarterly.

These are tiny numbers as far as most Websites go, but these are not consumer-oriented sites. The people who go to the sites are prospective startup founders, partners, and people looking for information on VC portfolio companies. Still, it’s interesting to see that First Round took the top spot; perhaps because its VCs are heavy bloggers. In fact, there seems to be a correlation between blogging and traffic to the related VC website VC and seed firms with investors who blog heavily, such as Founders Fund, Founder Collective, Foundry Group, Union Square, and Spark, all have top 25 websites.

Here’s the list of the top ten:

Venture Capital Firm Directory (Avg. Monthly Uniques – Q409)

1. First Round Capital (31,632)
2. Sequoia Capital (22,441)
3. Bessemer Venture Partners (14,825)
4. Highland Capital Partners (12,704)
5. Garage Technology Ventures (12,375)
6. Draper Fisher Jurvetson (11,823)
7. New Enterprise Associates (11,762)
8. Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (10,924)
9. Polaris Venture Partners (10,217)
10. Benchmark Capital (10,162)

Some VCs are getting an early Valentine’s Day gift fromTheFunded, the site where CEOs rate venture capitalists and their firms. Below you will find the top-ranked individual VCs, as determined by their ratings in 2009. What makes this ranking particularly useful to entrepreneurs is that it is ratings by other CEOs, often CEOs who have had direct dealings with the VCs they are rating.

While this is still a popularity contest of sorts (for instance, the rankings are not based on individual investment returns), presumably CEOs are smart enough to take investment performance into account. But they also take into account their own personal experiences with the individual VCs.  These are the VCs who CEOs love the most, and not just because they are nice but because they help CEOs do their jobs, which is to build great businesses.  Topping the list is Terry McGuire, co-Founder of Polaris Ventures and a big life sciences investor. Mark Suster of GRP Partners is No. 2.  David Sze of Greylock comes in at No. 7.  Brook H. Byers of  Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers is No. 10.  Kleiner’s star investor John Doerr is No.11  Michael Moritz from Sequoia is No. 32..

Anyone who is on this list is well-liked and respected by CEOs.   A total of 84 individual VCs (and some angel investors) made the cut out of 17,834 investment pros listed in TheFunded’s directory. To get on the list, each VC had to have at least an average rating of 4 out of 5 and have at least five separate reviews from CEO members of the Funded. (There are 13,480 CEO members). No more than one of the five ratings can be negative (a score of 3 or less).  Other VC that made the list include Howard Morgan (No. 28) and Josh Kopelman (No. 39) of First Round Capital, Bill Tai (No. 29) and George Zachary (no. 64) of Charles River Ventures, Roelof Botha of Sequoia (No. 50), Fred Wilson (No. 60) of Union Square Ventures, and angels Mike Maples, Jr. (No. 43)  and Ron Conway (No. 61).

You can compare this list to the most active VC firms of 2009 to get a sense of the overlap between these rankings and which firms are doing the most deals.  Some other insights that TheFunded shared with us: there was a lot of turnover in VC firms in 2009.  When TheFunded sent emails to all the investment pros in its directory, 38 percent either bounced back or replied with an automated message saying they’ve left their firms.  None of those people are on this list.  And about one or two firms a week became inactive, or 9 percent of the 4,005 firms listed in its directory.

TheFunded.com is offering two free tickets to the Future of Funding event on February 18th in San Mateo, where many of the top-ranked venture capitalists will be attending an awards ceremony. The tickets will go to the two best comments about the state of venture capital (as determined by us or TheFunded’s Adeo Ressi).

Top-Ranked VCs by TheFunded

1. Terrance G. McGuire, Managing General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners, rated 5 by 5 CEOs
2. Mark Suster, Partner at GRP Partners, rated 4.8571 by 7 CEOs
3. Andy Fillat, Managing Member at Leapfrog Ventures, rated 4.8333 by 6 CEOs
4. Dan Rua, Managing Partner at Inflexion Partners, rated 4.8 by 5 CEOs
5. Paul H. Klingenstein, Managing Partner at Aberdare Ventures, rated 4.6667 by 9 CEOs
6. Stuart Ellman, Managing Partner at RRE Ventures, rated 4.6667 by 6 CEOs
7. David Sze, Partner at Greylock Partners, rated 4.6429 by 14 CEOs
8. Ross A. Jaffe, Managing Director at Versant Ventures, rated 4.6364 by 11 CEOs
9. Steven D. Arnold, Managing General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners, rated 4.625 by 8 CEOs
10. Brook H. Byers, Partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, rated 4.6 by 10 CEOs
11. John Doerr, Partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, rated 4.5714 by 14 CEOs
12. Philip Gianos, General Partner at InterWest Partners, rated 4.5714 by 7 CEOs
13. James D. Robinson III, General Partner at RRE Ventures, rated 4.5556 by 9 CEOs
14. Richard W. Levandov, General Partner at Masthead Venture Partners, rated 4.5455 by 11 CEOs
15. Phil Black, General Partner at True Ventures, rated 4.5 by 12 CEOs
16. Andreas Stavropoulos, Managing Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, rated 4.5 by 6 CEOs
17. Jed Katz, Managing Director at Javelin Venture Partners, rated 4.4737 by 19 CEOs
18. William J. Link, Managing Director at Versant Ventures, rated 4.4444 by 9 CEOs
19. Jon Callaghan, General Partner at True Ventures, rated 4.4167 by 12 CEOs
20. Joerg Ueberla, General Partner at Wellington Partners, rated 4.4 by 5 CEOs
21. Tom Bogan, Partner at Greylock Partners, rated 4.4 by 5 CEOs
22. Maria Cirino, Managing Director at 406 Ventures, rated 4.4 by 5 CEOs
23. Mark S. Menell, Partner at Rustic Canyon Ventures, rated 4.3333 by 12 CEOs
24. Doug Pepper, General Partner at InterWest Partners, rated 4.3333 by 9 CEOs
25. Michael T. Fitzgerald, General Partner at Commonwealth Capital Ventures, rated 4.3333 by 9 CEOs
26. Bijan Salehizadeh, M.D., General Partner at Highland Capital Partners, rated 4.3333 by 9 CEOs
27. Nicolas El Baze, Partner at Partech International, rated 4.3333 by 6 CEOs
28. Howard Morgan, Partner at First Round Capital, rated 4.3077 by 13 CEOs
29. Bill Tai, Partner at Charles River Ventures, rated 4.2857 by 14 CEOs
30. David Ladd, Managing Director at Mayfield Fund, rated 4.2857 by 7 CEOs
31. Frank Boehnke, General Partner at Wellington Partners, rated 4.2857 by 7 CEOs
32. Michael Moritz, Partner at Sequoia Capital, rated 4.2778 by 18 CEOs
33. Peter Sinclair, Managing Member at Leapfrog Ventures, rated 4.2727 by 11 CEOs
34. Donald B. Milder, Managing Director at Versant Ventures, rated 4.25 by 8 CEOs
35. John Burke, General Partner at True Ventures, rated 4.25 by 8 CEOs
36. Bill Kaiser, Partner at Greylock Partners, rated 4.25 by 8 CEOs
37. Bill Elmore, General Partner at Foundation Capital, rated 4.25 by 8 CEOs
38. Mark Hatfield, Partner at Fairhaven Capital, rated 4.2222 by 9 CEOs
39. Joshua Kopelman, Managing Partner at First Round Capital, rated 4.2 by 30 CEOs
40. Lon H.H. Chow, General Partner at Apex Venture Partners, rated 4.2 by 5 CEOs
41. Dave Fachetti, Managing Director at Globespan Capital Partners, rated 4.2 by 5 CEOs
42. Edward L. Cahill, Partner at HLM Venture Partners, rated 4.2 by 5 CEOs
43. Mike Maples Jr., General Partner at Maples Investments, rated 4.1818 by 22 CEOs
44. David Stern, Venture Partner at Clearstone Venture Partners, rated 4.1818 by 11 CEOs
45. Curtis Feeny, Managing Director at Voyager Capital, rated 4.1667 by 12 CEOs
46. John W. Jarve, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, rated 4.1667 by 6 CEOs
47. Shawn T. Carolan, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, rated 4.1667 by 6 CEOs
48. Bob Spinner, Managing Director at Sigma Partners, rated 4.1667 by 6 CEOs
49. Stuart MacFarlane, Managing Director at Momentum Venture Management, rated 4.1667 by 6 CEOs
50. Roelof Botha, Partner at Sequoia Capital, rated 4.1538 by 26 CEOs
51. Anthony P. Lee, General Partner at Altos Ventures, rated 4.1538 by 13 CEOs
52. William D. Porteous, General Partner at RRE Ventures, rated 4.1538 by 13 CEOs
53. Michael Kim, Partner at Rustic Canyon Ventures, rated 4.1538 by 13 CEOs
54. Brent Ahrens, General Partner at Canaan Partners, rated 4.1429 by 7 CEOs
55. Eric Wiesen, Principal at RRE Ventures, rated 4.1429 by 7 CEOs
56. Alex Mendez, General Partner at Storm Ventures, Inc., rated 4.125 by 8 CEOs
57. Richard A. D’Amore, General Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, rated 4.125 by 8 CEOs
58. Jonathan Ebinger, Partner at BlueRun Ventures, rated 4.1111 by 9 CEOs
59. Gus Tai, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, rated 4.1 by 10 CEOs
60. Fred Wilson, Partner at Union Square Ventures, rated 4.0952 by 21 CEOs
61. Ron Conway, General Partner at SV Angel, rated 4.0909 by 11 CEOs
62. Hodong Nam, General Partner at Altos Ventures, rated 4.0833 by 12 CEOs
63. Gilman Louie, Partner at Alsop Louie Partners, rated 4.0769 by 13 CEOs
64. George Zachary, Partner at Charles River Ventures, rated 4 by 16 CEOs
65. Paul Maeder, General Partner at Highland Capital Partners, rated 4 by 9 CEOs
66. Warren J. Packard, Managing Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, rated 4 by 9 CEOs
67. Bryan Schreier, Partner at Sequoia Capital, rated 4 by 9 CEOs
68. Brian Pokomy, Associate at SV Angel, rated 4 by 8 CEOs
69. Byron Deeter, Venture Principal at Bessemer Venture Partners, rated 4 by 8 CEOs
70. Kevin Spain, Principal at Emergence Capital Partners, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
71. Thatcher Bell, Principle at Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham Ventures, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
72. Kirk Holland, General Partner at Vista Ventures, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
73. Jonathan Seelig, Managing Director at Globespan Capital Partners, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
74. Andrew L. Zalasin, General Partner/CFO at RRE Ventures, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
75. Bruce K. Taragin, Partner at Blumberg Capital, rated 4 by 7 CEOs
76. Frederick J. Dotzler, Managing Director at De Novo Ventures, rated 4 by 6 CEOs
77. Max Niederhofer, Associate at Atlas Venture, rated 4 by 6 CEOs
78. Gil Dibner, Principal at Genesis Partners, rated 4 by 6 CEOs
79. Ryan Ziegler, Investment Manager at Edison Venture Fund, rated 4 by 6 CEOs
80. Bob Pavey, General Partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, rated 4 by 6 CEOs
81. Philippe Herbert, Partner at Banexi Ventures Partners, rated 4 by 5 CEOs
82. Eric Hjerpe, Partner at Atlas Venture, rated 4 by 5 CEOs
83. Angelo J. Santinelli, General Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, rated 4 by 5 CEOs
84. David Min, Principal at Steamboat Ventures, rated 4 by 5 CEOs

Photo credit: Flickr/le vent le cri