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I suspect that's just people having their delusions of rampant future growth and expansion of twitter being crushed in the gears of mundane reality. These moves

I suspect that's just people having their delusions of rampant future growth and expansion of twitter being crushed in the gears of mundane reality. These moves are perfectly fine for a normal company that intends to continue operating at about the same level as it is currently indefinitely. But people view every tech company through the lens of apple, google, amazon, etc. They expect growth, they expect new stuff, and so on. The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Companies, and their revenue, don't necessarily scale the way we're used to from the experience of industrial companies.

kordless 11y ago
They turned off their APIs to application developers. What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together.
- jeff_marshall 11y ago
  >What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together So, I'm genuienly curious. How do they make money by "ramping that shit up"? I've seen a lot of companies that have 'get users' as their M.O., but I have no insight into the "profit!!!" phase. Opening their user base seems contary to "profit!!!", from a laymans perspective. It seems to me like API/User info availability is their leverage w.r.t. profitability, much as it pains me as a potential developer who would like that information for free. How does decentralization make them (and their investors) money? I can't see a way to do both given the incentives.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - j42 11y ago
    While not stated eloquently, I do think there's some truth in that. 1. Open API's, good documentation and community engagement goes a long way in establishing developer trust. I don't believe developer trust is correlated significantly with revenue (directly), but it's absolutely correlated with acquisition. I'd argue that Angular or React were partially successful because of the stickiness of their communities, and that's a powerful self-perpetuating force. 2. Monetization is in the queries. Facebook and Google know this. Throwing aside all of their auxiliary services, emerging markets, hardware, et al... between 70-90% of their respective revenue is from direct advertising. If there's a way to scale or "ramp" their revenue model, this would be the portion to focus on.
    - inthewoods 11y ago
      Monetization of the queries doesn't appear to be a significant revenue opportunity for either Google or Facebook - why would this be different for Twitter? Not that this can't be a revenue source, but how big is it? An alternative: I agree with everyone that they should have turned the APIs back on - they just should have made it mandatory to carry advertising as part of the feeds in order to access the feeds. They could have also layered on federated advertising for anyone consuming the API - meaning, allow those folks to show their own advertising in-stream. They simply pay Twitter a cut. Both of these may have helped them both grow the audience and advertising at the same time.
      - kordless 11y ago
        Monetization of the queries isn't a significant revenue opportunity because of scaling payment issues. Solve that, and you solve getting paid for doing something you are good at, which is throwing millions of statuses at millions of users.
        inthewoods 11y ago
        I'm not getting why you think this data is so valuable or who you think the audience is - are you suggesting that millions of people would pay for the feed and it is just a problem of being able to pay?
  - crashedsnow 11y ago
    I think it's supposed to work like this: assuming more users == more revenue, then opening up and promoting the use of APIs creates alternative channels to acquire new users (partner apps have their own incentive to attract users etc). Where it can hurt is when the integrating apps either don't substantially move the needle on new user acquisition, or worse they cannibalize your user base by creating reasons for your users to NOT visit your site. IMO though the API "shutdown" was shortsighted by Twitter. If people are using a competing interface instead of your own, then maybe you should fix your own rather than just shutting down the API. Of course that's easy to say as an outsider. I'm sure the truth is much more nuanced.
    - kelseydh 11y ago
      Facebook's API gave birth to the billion dollar juggernaut that is Tinder. Tinder piggybacked off of Facebook OAuth logins in a useful way, and now Facebook has further cemented their permanence as it will now be very difficult for that dating app to sever themselves from Facebook OAuth.
  - kordless 11y ago
    Note I said "or" there. Decentralizing the infrastructure would make things cheaper and might give you revenue opportunity (and growth) that you wouldn't have otherwise. For example, perhaps you get into the business of aggregating ad sales to downstream providers. As for directly monetizing the APIs, one thought that springs to mind is charging for the firehose in a federated way. You could, for example, have a query endpoint that looks like this to guarantee standard issuance of data, identity and payment: GET /api/v1/status/access { "payment_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds", "rate_bytes_sec": 50000000, "ask_expires_at": 1444492687, "access_token": "h458Yf301", "ask_in_satoshis": 1000000, "ask_window_secs": 3600 } Make a payment to the address, then start querying at 50MB/sec for the duration of your valid token (in this example, 2 hours): GET /api/v1/status/h458Yf301 { "payment_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds", "payment_received_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds", "payment_received": 2000000, "access_expires_at": 1444499887, "identity_screenname": "kordless", "status_data_begins": [ ] } And yes, I'm proposing Twitter should use Bitcoin to monetize query traffic. Even better, charge people for posting lots of statuses, or following and unfollowing lots of people. Link ask price to signal/noise ratio.
    - inthewoods 11y ago
      "Note I said "or" there. Decentralizing the infrastructure would make things cheaper and might give you revenue opportunity (and growth) that you wouldn't have otherwise. For example, perhaps you get into the business of aggregating ad sales to downstream providers." Well, maybe, but you can't save your way to $2b in revenue. Stock prices don't generally go up on cost savings, they go up because of future revenue AND profit expectations. Silicon Valley and Wall Street both prize growth in revenue way over profit. But you're correct that they might discover another revenue stream - but now you're betting a lot on the value of federation. "Make a payment to the address, then start querying at 50MB/sec for the duration of your valid token (in this example, 2 hours):" I think you are vastly overstating the number of people or companies that would be willing to pay for this firehose. While it may be useful to some companies, overall the data isn't likely to be enough to be a $1b opportunity. More importantly, the number of people willing to buy isn't likely to grow - so a B2B play can be a minor part of their revenue but I don't believe they'd be able to depend on it for massive growth. "And yes, I'm proposing Twitter should use Bitcoin to monetize query traffic. Even better, charge people for posting lots of statuses, or following and unfollowing lots of people. Link ask price to signal/noise ratio." Given the current cost structure of other services (Facebook/Instagram/SnapChat), I'd argue you're unlikely to get anyone to pay for it, and you're reducing both the size and any potential growth of your audience dramatically.
- joosters 11y ago
  I thought they did exactly as you said: the APIs are available as long as you pay Twitter for them...
smacktoward 11y ago
> The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.
- jliptzin 11y ago
  Uh, most of that money was from the IPO and that was probably done because founders/early investors wanted to cash in. I'd say the vast majority of that funding was not necessary to scale to where they are today.
  - MichaelGG 11y ago
    Really? Wikipedia shows they raised over a billion from investors before IPO (including individual rounds of $800M and $300M.) Of the $800M, half went to cash out. I'd agree though that at least technically, to deliver the core user product, this money simply wasn't needed. (It might have been needed for advertising or building up contracts, etc.)
  - eggie 11y ago
    It didn't help improve the interface much. For example, on this site the interface shows me quickly who is replying to whom. A billion dollars in and Twitter still can't do this. They tried to be the world's largest chat room and basically came up AOL.
    - cpeterso 11y ago
      And the UI changes they have made are demonstrably worse, such as their seemingly random threading, constantly losing page scroll position, and repeating earlier tweets.
- trjordan 11y ago
  1) Operating is not the same as building, especially if you have to figure things out. 2) Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter.

kordless 11y ago

They turned off their APIs to application developers. What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together.

jeff_marshall 11y ago
>What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together So, I'm genuienly curious. How do they make money by "ramping that shit up"? I've seen a lot of companies that have 'get users' as their M.O., but I have no insight into the "profit!!!" phase. Opening their user base seems contary to "profit!!!", from a laymans perspective. It seems to me like API/User info availability is their leverage w.r.t. profitability, much as it pains me as a potential developer who would like that information for free. How does decentralization make them (and their investors) money? I can't see a way to do both given the incentives.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- j42 11y ago
  While not stated eloquently, I do think there's some truth in that. 1. Open API's, good documentation and community engagement goes a long way in establishing developer trust. I don't believe developer trust is correlated significantly with revenue (directly), but it's absolutely correlated with acquisition. I'd argue that Angular or React were partially successful because of the stickiness of their communities, and that's a powerful self-perpetuating force. 2. Monetization is in the queries. Facebook and Google know this. Throwing aside all of their auxiliary services, emerging markets, hardware, et al... between 70-90% of their respective revenue is from direct advertising. If there's a way to scale or "ramp" their revenue model, this would be the portion to focus on.
  - inthewoods 11y ago
    Monetization of the queries doesn't appear to be a significant revenue opportunity for either Google or Facebook - why would this be different for Twitter? Not that this can't be a revenue source, but how big is it? An alternative: I agree with everyone that they should have turned the APIs back on - they just should have made it mandatory to carry advertising as part of the feeds in order to access the feeds. They could have also layered on federated advertising for anyone consuming the API - meaning, allow those folks to show their own advertising in-stream. They simply pay Twitter a cut. Both of these may have helped them both grow the audience and advertising at the same time.
    - kordless 11y ago
      Monetization of the queries isn't a significant revenue opportunity because of scaling payment issues. Solve that, and you solve getting paid for doing something you are good at, which is throwing millions of statuses at millions of users.
      - inthewoods 11y ago
        I'm not getting why you think this data is so valuable or who you think the audience is - are you suggesting that millions of people would pay for the feed and it is just a problem of being able to pay?
- crashedsnow 11y ago
  I think it's supposed to work like this: assuming more users == more revenue, then opening up and promoting the use of APIs creates alternative channels to acquire new users (partner apps have their own incentive to attract users etc). Where it can hurt is when the integrating apps either don't substantially move the needle on new user acquisition, or worse they cannibalize your user base by creating reasons for your users to NOT visit your site. IMO though the API "shutdown" was shortsighted by Twitter. If people are using a competing interface instead of your own, then maybe you should fix your own rather than just shutting down the API. Of course that's easy to say as an outsider. I'm sure the truth is much more nuanced.
  - kelseydh 11y ago
    Facebook's API gave birth to the billion dollar juggernaut that is Tinder. Tinder piggybacked off of Facebook OAuth logins in a useful way, and now Facebook has further cemented their permanence as it will now be very difficult for that dating app to sever themselves from Facebook OAuth.
- kordless 11y ago
  Note I said "or" there. Decentralizing the infrastructure would make things cheaper and might give you revenue opportunity (and growth) that you wouldn't have otherwise. For example, perhaps you get into the business of aggregating ad sales to downstream providers. As for directly monetizing the APIs, one thought that springs to mind is charging for the firehose in a federated way. You could, for example, have a query endpoint that looks like this to guarantee standard issuance of data, identity and payment: GET /api/v1/status/access { "payment_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds", "rate_bytes_sec": 50000000, "ask_expires_at": 1444492687, "access_token": "h458Yf301", "ask_in_satoshis": 1000000, "ask_window_secs": 3600 } Make a payment to the address, then start querying at 50MB/sec for the duration of your valid token (in this example, 2 hours): GET /api/v1/status/h458Yf301 { "payment_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds", "payment_received_address": "13kU1qPtM3WWXrNugWfRPNM1BniMQDw9Ds", "payment_received": 2000000, "access_expires_at": 1444499887, "identity_screenname": "kordless", "status_data_begins": [ ] } And yes, I'm proposing Twitter should use Bitcoin to monetize query traffic. Even better, charge people for posting lots of statuses, or following and unfollowing lots of people. Link ask price to signal/noise ratio.
  - inthewoods 11y ago
    "Note I said "or" there. Decentralizing the infrastructure would make things cheaper and might give you revenue opportunity (and growth) that you wouldn't have otherwise. For example, perhaps you get into the business of aggregating ad sales to downstream providers." Well, maybe, but you can't save your way to $2b in revenue. Stock prices don't generally go up on cost savings, they go up because of future revenue AND profit expectations. Silicon Valley and Wall Street both prize growth in revenue way over profit. But you're correct that they might discover another revenue stream - but now you're betting a lot on the value of federation. "Make a payment to the address, then start querying at 50MB/sec for the duration of your valid token (in this example, 2 hours):" I think you are vastly overstating the number of people or companies that would be willing to pay for this firehose. While it may be useful to some companies, overall the data isn't likely to be enough to be a $1b opportunity. More importantly, the number of people willing to buy isn't likely to grow - so a B2B play can be a minor part of their revenue but I don't believe they'd be able to depend on it for massive growth. "And yes, I'm proposing Twitter should use Bitcoin to monetize query traffic. Even better, charge people for posting lots of statuses, or following and unfollowing lots of people. Link ask price to signal/noise ratio." Given the current cost structure of other services (Facebook/Instagram/SnapChat), I'd argue you're unlikely to get anyone to pay for it, and you're reducing both the size and any potential growth of your audience dramatically.
joosters 11y ago
I thought they did exactly as you said: the APIs are available as long as you pay Twitter for them...

smacktoward 11y ago

> The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.

jliptzin 11y ago
Uh, most of that money was from the IPO and that was probably done because founders/early investors wanted to cash in. I'd say the vast majority of that funding was not necessary to scale to where they are today.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Really? Wikipedia shows they raised over a billion from investors before IPO (including individual rounds of $800M and $300M.) Of the $800M, half went to cash out. I'd agree though that at least technically, to deliver the core user product, this money simply wasn't needed. (It might have been needed for advertising or building up contracts, etc.)
- eggie 11y ago
  It didn't help improve the interface much. For example, on this site the interface shows me quickly who is replying to whom. A billion dollars in and Twitter still can't do this. They tried to be the world's largest chat room and basically came up AOL.
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    And the UI changes they have made are demonstrably worse, such as their seemingly random threading, constantly losing page scroll position, and repeating earlier tweets.
trjordan 11y ago
1) Operating is not the same as building, especially if you have to figure things out. 2) Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter.