Technology lowers barriers to business entry on a number of levels and successful small to medium sized businesses can grow from the most modest of environments. In the teeth of a recession it seems pertinent to question the fairness of profitable organic models being obliterated by monsters.

Naïve, maybe – especially in an period awash with market consolidation, mergers and acquisitions – but pertinent nonetheless.

Developers have expressed concern about Twitter’s acquisition of mobile app provider, Atebits, makers of Tweetie. They fear the big bluebird will build more applications in-house or purchase providers to harness an overall vision, making outside apps and services obsolete.

“When we did the research we found we were really under-serving our users,” said Twitter CEO Evan Williams on their blog. “We had to have a core experience on major (mobile) platforms just like we have to have one on the web.”

Why? Because mobile is where the money is and Twitter up to now has been struggling to make money. So perhaps developers should stop producing new Twitter mobile applications then, given their recent acquisitions. Those who attempt to monetise Twitter through an ad funded application know the risks and dangers of competitors, the effect of Twitter swooping for a competitor rather than themselves.

In April Twitter also announced an agreement to purchase messaging infrastructure provider Cloudhopper, its second mobile acquisition that month after Atebits. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Cloudhopper powers SMS campaigns in the North American, European and African markets – according to Twitter, (though it’s the name of the founder, Joe Lauer, rather than the name of the two year old company which seems better known).

This acquisition enables Twitter to connect directly to carriers across the globe, although it does this already, both directly and through 3rd party connectivity providers in the US, including what was formerly known as MX Telecom and recently became Amdocs, or Amdocs payment division, OpenMarket (a previous incarnation of which Joe Lauer founded).

While Cloudhopper can help with the large player AT&T and Verizon connectivity, third party providers are invaluable in connecting to the many smaller regional US carriers, using established relationships and trusted technologies which have existed for a number of years. How will the Cloudhopper division adapt to accommodate these?

Twitter is so large and its reach so global that it will need the peripheral players to continue serving its mammoth ecosystem. It continues to grow so rapidly that there will inevitably be some uncontrollable service leakage which it can’t absorb.

But its eyes are on a bigger prize. At almost a billion SMS-based tweets per month, there’s serious cash to be made from SMS-driven Twitter – the ability for users to send and read selected Tweets by basic text message – as well as from associated mobile data and in-app ad funding. Many users enjoy the simplicity of sending and receiving Tweets by text message and Twitter’s founders openly admit that text messaging was their inspiration, the fit is obvious.

It seems that the challenge for Twitter, with the help of major global carriers and its acquisitions, is to keep that circle as tight as possible. That’s before a another player either pounces, or maybe, just maybe, emerges to make their service obsolete..