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Twitter CEO Dorsey Apologizes to Developers

474 points by jsnathan 11y ago

dansingerman 11y ago
I think that horse may have bolted Jack. I am not sure a developer who had the rug pulled from under them once will take the risk of investing their time in the Twitter API again. Fool me once etc...
jedberg 11y ago
I think the picture in the article sums it up perfectly. It would be really hard to ever trust them again unless they were willing to put a contract in place with some sort of financial penalty to them. And even then I'm not sure I would trust them.
- calcsam 11y ago
  Here it is: https://twitter.com/jf/status/524412388745818113?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/jf/status/524412388745818113?ref_src=tws...
  - kzhahou 11y ago
    "Ok, great job team, let's launch our new Twitter-based product today. Three...two...one...LAUNCH! <Access denied - TOS violation> AAAAARGH! Good grief!"
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
admax88q 11y ago
Nothing like an "apology" that doesn't apologize for the real wrongdoing. How I love corporate speak. "Our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable. We want to come to you today and apologize for the confusion." Yeah it was the "confusion" that was wrong. Nothing like apologizing but not admitting fault either. He's basically saying "we did the right thing, we just didn't communicate it clearly."
- aikah 11y ago
  You're absolutely right. they should have said "We apologize for the kind of relationship we developed with IT businesses building on top of Twitter". Because this apology is basically "We apologize if we hurt someone but we're not going to change our policies, merely fire the guy in charge".
- bloaf 11y ago
  "From now on, when we hose developers, we will do so in an unambiguous and predictable manner."
  - troels 11y ago
    And it will be predictable indeed.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      "The cycle cannot be broken."
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    Honestly that would at least be an improvement
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - Alupis 11y ago
    Why does it seem it's only Twitter with this problem? (or at least the most frequent and public). Twitter "hoses" developers all the time who were making money based on apps supporting Twitter. They "hose" the developer because Twitter would rather make that money instead of allowing others to, yet they then fail to capitalize on the vacuum they just created. Over time, it's made Twitter a seemingly very unattractive platform to try to dev against. Twitter doesn't make much in terms of earnings on their own, it seems it would be in their best interest to allow an ecosystem around their platform.
rebel 11y ago
It really seems like this is where you should have some sort of concrete contract/agreement to reassure developers. Without that, I can't see how anyone could trust them.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  especially when it comes from a temporary position ion the chart and tos clearly states tos can be changed unilaterally at any time https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/agreement-and-policy https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/agreement-and-policy
tacos 11y ago
If you're building a business on Twitter's back you're fuckin' nuts. Twitter can't even build a business on Twitter.
- adventured 11y ago
  Why isn't a $2+ billion sales run-rate with 50%+ annual growth a business? They'll match the sales that Salesforce had for fiscal 2014, within eight to ten quarters, even assuming slower growth.
  - gaius 11y ago
    Because they are burning cash every quarter anyway? Anyone can buy revenue.
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    i got a great business, people give me 75 cents i give them a dollar, it scales infinitely, and has the potential for absolutely titanic revenue, interested in investing?
- samstave 11y ago
  They do make a damn good lunch though. They should pivot to a series of restaurants where you can only message positive reviews regarding the amazing food you just ate while surrounded by a lot of hot, young tech workers. Let the public access the THREE freaking floors of food in their HQ where each employee is required to act as a server (no pun) to customers for an hour or so a day. The menu is a stream you follow, and you reply with "@table10 orders the tataki, chicken and veggies" and the SRE (service restaurant enabler) delivers the food while describing Flock...
crabasa 11y ago
The single most important thing that Twitter can do to encourage developers to build on their platform is to completely and unambiguously align interests. If a developer is successful, Twitter should be successful, and vice versa. This is infinitely more reliable than any promise and is how all successful application platforms operate.
- firasd 11y ago
  Exactly. The problem isn’t that we can’t believe Dorsey’s intentions, it’s that Dorsey’s intentions don’t necessarily create the reality of Twitter’s future. Whether it’s Twitter or Facebook (or others), these companies will keep changing their product and business and thus consumers of their API will always be on quicksand.
- vijayr 11y ago
  That would be solid business sense. If developers are successful on Twitter's platform, they wouldn't easily leave for the next shiny thing. Customers also would benefit, as products won't disappear overnight because twitter cut off access. It is a win-win for everyone.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    But how do developers being successful on Twitter's platform translate to Twitter making money? Developers aren't really willing to pay for access to Twitter, and I don't think many of them want to show Twitter's ads, as that removes a way for them to make money by offering an ad free version, and makes offering their own ads that much less unpalatable.
    - billmalarky 11y ago
      >But how do developers being successful on Twitter's platform translate to Twitter making money? Same way 3rd party developers helped originally grow twitter. A variety of twitter 3rd party tools drives user engagement with twitter. That data most likely has value that twitter simply hasn't figured out how to extract efficiently yet (slapping ads in the feed is an easy monetization strategy, not necessarily a good one).
aikah 11y ago
Twitter and Facebook are 2 different products, the latter being a social network ,the former a "social network message bus" since relationships and streams are public by default. Well Twitter should embrace that fact instead pulling the plug on successful Twitter based products and offer paid plans for business who want to build on top of twitter.
- dave_ops 11y ago
  This is actually a good idea I think. Salesforce Chatter is a thing, and it sells well, and it's also terrible. An on-prem corporate twitter would actually be useful.
deleted 11y ago
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Karunamon 11y ago
Apology not accepted. Twitter tipped their hand here a long time ago - once the network got strong enough, start locking things down so those crazy devs don't do anything cool or interesting that you can't monetize, nevermind if it makes the user experience many times better.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  And of course it goes both ways, like Instagram preventing the pictures from showing on the twitter timeline (Not saying twitter didn't deserve this)
swang 11y ago
Translation: "We're too in the box to think outside of the box. So other developers please find a way to make Twitter popular again so we can steal that application[0], bar any other third-party from making anything related to that idea so we can be the sole monetizer of said application. [0] Application not being an "app", but more of a new way to use twitter.
- jalfresi 11y ago
  Absolutely! If any dev falls for this trap again then they need their head examined. Fool me once...
pavornyoh 11y ago
You only get one chance to make a first impression. Apologizing is a good step and most will forgive but never forget.
- deveac 11y ago
  >You only get one chance to make a first impression. Same problem they are facing with the massive number of users that tried Twitter and abandoned it. Much easier to acquire a new user than to re-acquire an old user that has already decided against.
vonklaus 11y ago
Anyone burned by twitter will think twice about working on it again, however it is likely too valuable of a platform to not give ample consideration to. I reckon twitter will merge with square and provide end-to-end advertising metrics for impressions --> clicks --> cart additions --> purchases. This will be valuable, and as much as I think twitter is silly, if they provide this they will do well. Platform companies with stroes: * Microsoft * Google Play * Apple * [ empty ] Super conflated and contrived appraisal here, but Twitter better post a strong offering in empty before facebook and they can't do that well without square and a platform or decentralized market. All this is to say, Twitter needs developers bad and to the extent they win them from Facebook and other platforms will be tied to the value they provide. I think that value will be provided by purchasing square in a merger of equals and building a dumb pipe platform, letting developers curate the content and providing stores. We'll see what developer sentiment is, first few comments lead me to beleive it is not great.
- em0ney 11y ago
  Interesting take on the future. I agree about the current state of developer sentiment. I think anyone who looks at a company like Microsoft will see that developer sentiment isn't static. Might take years for things to change but I commend them for taking the right first steps towards rectifying the situation.
deveac 11y ago
The tough thing is that the calculation developers make is a mixed bag of components that involves not just trust, but fiscal opportunity. People's fortunes and livelihoods are tied to developing for a platform. In some ways, this ship may have sailed. Might be a situation where even if devs find a way to regain some trust, the actual perceived value of the commitment these days isn't as alluring. The question is, what has fundamentally changed about Twitter's business model that has now re-aligned its incentives to better match those of the developer community to enable them to make this promise today? Anything?
muppetman 11y ago
Why would you bother to come back after being kicked in the teeth, to a platform that is now stagnating, showing little signs of growth and has no obvious revenue model for app developers? This is the cart before the horse. They need to fix Twitter so that people want to develop for it again, not say "Hey, here's this downtrodden mess, come and make it better for us!"
protomyth 11y ago
If they had announced that developers can make twitter client apps and display foreign services (e.g. instagram) in the same stream with the tweets without limit to the number of end users, I would be interested. I just assume this is a statement to the shareholders and will have very little effect on developers.
mmanfrin 11y ago
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...
- gaius 11y ago
  ... Won't get fooled again.
- hoodoof 11y ago
  www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ux3DKxxFoM
milge 11y ago
Too little, too late. But thanks for the important lesson of not building something on Twitter's platform when the rug can be pulled out from under you. That lesson applies to other platforms too.
GhotiFish 11y ago
This seems like it's almost too small of a world view. When twitter pulled the rug out, it informed a shift in thinking, everywhere. Not just with twitter. The wisdom became "Don't build your business on another one." and twitter was the primary example of why not. For twitter to turn around and say "Ok, we made some mistakes, and we want to develop that trust again." is misunderstanding what happened. twitter changed the conventional wisdom, not just wisdom about twitter.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  The wisdom became "Don't build your business on another one." That wisdom is WAY older than twitter. It may have become a fashionable meme again because of Twitter, but platform risk has been around probably about as long as computing. Certainly the idea goes back at least as far as the infamous DOS/Lotus 1-2-3 dustup. Google "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" for example. Note that whether or not Microsoft actually tried to break Lotus 1-2-3 isn't the point. I'm just saying people have been aware of, and talking about, these kinds of risks for a LONG time.
  - GhotiFish 11y ago
    That's fair, it's that saying: "Everything old is new again".
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Well, new generations often needs new lessons. I'm from the generation that contains the majority of potential developers of sexy Twitter-based hot unicorn Uber-for-Cloud-Based-Social-Gardening startups and I haven't ever heard any stories about DOS/Lotus 1-2-3. Fortunately, Twitter made it up for us. "The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Startups rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory they are extinguished. Lotus were not the first. They did not create the Platform. They did not forge the APIs. They merely found them - the legacy of my kind." - Twitter CEO in my twisted imagination.
__e 11y ago
It's not just Twitter. Most popular APIs tend to regulate and constrain use as they grow popular. This has dissuaded developers, and certainly startups from building products on top of APIs. VCs do not like companies depending on third party APIs either, due to the fact that they may be arm twisted by the API service. Twitter's attitude towards developers is potentially impacting the uptake of libraries like Fabric, despite having nothing to do with their API. What Twitter may have a shot at, as a result of this effort is to get usage of their libraries like Fabric on par standing ground with libraries and products like Parse from Facebook.
- 1ris 11y ago
  3-5 years ago everything had a API. No nothing has.
sgoraya 11y ago
The recent Standford ETL talk by Jeff Seibert (Senior Director of Product at Twitter) provides some insight into the development of the Twitter API's/SDK (Fabric). Overall, I thought it was one of the better and more practical talks. http://goo.gl/WfAiPU http://goo.gl/WfAiPU
SEJeff 11y ago
He should apologize a bit more sincerely to the developers he just laid off.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Oh, so another cycle starts. Here's a note I took back earlier, around the time of the original Twitter fiasco, pasted straight from my quotes file: * Sovereign from Mass Effect on using someone else's technology "Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it." Strangely, it seems to describe recent (2012/2013) situation with API of Twitter perfectly.
- 0xCMP 11y ago
  I love the reference
- bipin_nag 11y ago
  Added to my quotes file. Thanks.
- austinjp 11y ago
  Feels a lot more like Amazon.
- ISL 11y ago
  Twitter could avoid this sentiment by making a fiscally-binding statement: "We have opened up our API, and have placed $5B in escrow with the Gates Foundation, who will return 70% of the investment income to Twitter. If we deny API access to developers before 2020, the Gates Foundation will keep the principal." Someone sufficiently clever could make a similar, but perpetual, statement.
  - niyazpk 11y ago
    Wouldn't they need $5B lying around? Do they?
    - funkyy 11y ago
      You and your logic, making some good reasonable points.
at-fates-hands 11y ago
Well this article is a bit click baity. The original article they reference is from 2012 and talks about the API changes and Twitter's choice to shut down apps it feels are competing with its own app. All I got out of the current article was Jack trying to woo developers back without any hint of what exactly they're changing to be more developer friendly. If I was burned by them in 2012, I doubt this would get rid of any lingering doubts I had about working on their platform.
manghoti 11y ago
> Going forward, the company says it will improve its communication with developers. “We want to make sure that we have a great relationship with our developers, an open and honest relationship with our developers,” he said. I'm curious why this kind of language hasn't fallen out of favor. It sounds so completely empty to me, I have to assume it does for everyone else.
- mcnamaratw 11y ago
  It doesn't have to work on everybody. You only need a good solid group who hear what they want to hear.
libria 11y ago
Why are so many developers naive about this? Twitter has a responsibility to its employees & shareholders to turn a profit. In some stages, courting developers will make sense, and in others, not. A lot of developers are taking it like a jilted lover. This is a business relationship, and it is neither personal nor permanent. If you can build on their platform today, reap the success while it lasts. For some of you, that uncertainty is not worth the investment. Great! Just stop expecting Twitter to sacrifice business health to keep one group of partners happy.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  Twitter has a responsibility to its employees & shareholders to turn a profit Yes, but fucking over developers is not, generally speaking, a good way to accomplish that end! That's the sad thing about all of this... Twitter haven't just been hosing developers, they've been hosing themselves by destroying the ecosystem around Twitter, thereby making Twitter less valuable.
- frabcus 11y ago
  My problem with them is they refused to even talk. We had a plan that would make them money - they without notice just killed our API access. Why didn't they call us first? Fuck that, not going near them.
- SirensOfTitan 11y ago
  Twitter is a communication platform. Developers building on that platform is a great way to grow that platform, no? This is especially true in that Twitter's mobile app has been terrible for many years. As Facebook and Google put tremendous resources into mobile, Twitter relied on high quality 3rd party apps like TweetBot while at the same time put ridiculous restrictions on them: > Apps replicating Twitter’s core user experience (what we’ve called “traditional Twitter clients”) are discouraged and have a ceiling of 100,000 users, among other restrictions. Be sure to read the applicable TOS clauses carefully if you’re considering building such an app. If twitter is so financially unhealthy that supporting platform would topple their 'business health,' then maybe their health wasn't that good to start with.
- 11y ago
jaytaylor 11y ago
From TFA: Can developers trust Twitter this time? No. Don't get me wrong, back while working at Klout we got to meet Jack Dorsey and he is intelligent and interesting. Personally I like him and have some respect for him. With that said, CEO's don't stay forever so there are no guarantees about how long the reign of Jack will last. Since he won't always be in a position to make good on this promise, how can we trust? What is it actually worth? Where is the olive branch? Words sound nice but I've learned to pay more attention to actions. How about something like free firehose access or at least making it affordable for mere mortals? Just "turning the api back on" won't be enough to convince me to sink anymore dev time into $twtr.
- 15155 11y ago
  > How about something like free firehose access "Nope, million bucks, besides, you couldn't possibly handle XX megabits of streaming data per second!!" Every conversation I've had with anyone at Twitter.
  - mrweasel 11y ago
    That's not exactly unreasonable is it? There are companies that will pay for fire hose access, so it's clearly worth something. It's also their only real product.
- mattzito 11y ago
  Almost no one actually needs firehose access, and they charge accordingly (particularly since that's a huge chunk of their value). If you need programmatic access to data, the folks at Gnip will happily sell you the data you need, and at expensive-but-imo-reasonable rates.
- unfunco 11y ago
  Even if the firehose was affordable for mere mortals, those mere mortals would still need the funds to receive potentially hundreds of thousands of tweets per second (peak)) – which is a lot of bandwidth, persistent storage, processing cycles, etc – and that doesn't come cheap either. If someone can't afford access to the firehose, then my guess is that they can't afford the infrastructure to consume the data anyway.
michaelbuckbee 11y ago
The API Terms of Use haven't changed: https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms The most egregious of which continues to be: "Apps replicating Twitter’s core user experience (what we’ve called “traditional Twitter clients”) are discouraged and have a ceiling of 100,000 users, among other restrictions. Be sure to read the applicable TOS clauses carefully if you’re considering building such an app." This is really bad as "core user experience" is something open to a very wide degree of interpretation.
- lemevi 11y ago
  Yeah, until they revert this change, it doesn't matter and to be honest I doubt developers even care about Twitter anymore. I certainly don't.
- guan 11y ago
  I couldn’t find video of Dorsey’s remarks. Was there any hint that Twitter might relax those restrictions?
  - killwhitey 11y ago
    Here's the video https://twitter.com/Flight/status/656882929923059713 https://twitter.com/Flight/status/656882929923059713
- homulilly 11y ago
  Yeah as long as this policy remains in effect nobody's going to get back on board.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  I maintain the Twitter API client library for a popular language, and I have a love-hate relationship with the Twitter API. Parts of it are really nice, but sometimes I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole with the documentation. The example responses they provide are correct... except when they aren't. They use heterogenous JSON in their responses (silently replacing string literals with arrays, but only for some responses, etc.). They've added error codes without updating the docs for months on end (which sort of defeats the point of an error code - what use is it if you don't know what the error means?) The only way I'm notified of these changes is when people file bug reports with the library, and I always have to ask them to tell me the exact query that cause the error for them, because they're almost impossible to reproduce otherwise[0], and the API is so inconsistent that I can't try and manually search for similar responses that will cause the error. On the other hand, the Twitter API is a seamless[1] way to interface with an incredibly useful and powerful product, and it's a great source of data. I just wish the developer experience were seamless. [0] e.g. https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda/issues/82 https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda/issues/82 [1] Assuming your client library works, but I can't assume that if I'm the one responsible for maintaining it!
deleted 11y ago
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pasbesoin 11y ago
Fool me once... I hope many people have instead learned to generalize the earlier message, in the last some years. Crudely but aptly stated: "Don't be a sharecropper."
catshirt 11y ago
this sounds like a fish flopping around on land, looking for purpose, and developers to help it make money
mcnamaratw 11y ago
I predict the "culture of chill" will lead to a substantial minority of younger developers wandering in and giving their stuff away for no benefit a second time. I mean ... you aren't ... mad ... bro? Of course not. We're cool. Glad we had this talk.
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
Hmm. So here's the problem. Company allows others to build cool things on top of it. Sounds good. Then others start making money from the stuff they build but Company isn't really making money and the others are selling because they are filling in Company's deficiencies around their product. So how do you fix it so Company makes more money? Kill the others. That's why the first wave of stuff died on Twitter's platform. So what's different now? Has Twitter figured out how to make money and fill in the gaps in Twitter? If they have then this could end up working out. If not, how could things be different this time around? Color me skeptical.
jeena 11y ago
Too late Twitter, https://github.com/jeena/Twittia https://github.com/jeena/Twittia is dead once and for all!
cruise02 11y ago
It's not officially Fall until Lucy pulls away the football.
f1nch3r 11y ago
That was quite the big city apology.
cft 11y ago
Does this apply to Meerkat ban for example?
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Eh they need to prevent spammy apps like FB had to. Meerkat knew it was acting improperly but hey, "growth hacking".
hartator 11y ago
Stupid question, how was Twitter bad with external developers? I've built a few services using Twitter, Facebook and Google+ each time and I didn't have anything bad to say about Twitter, they were always the easiest to deal with.
- OJFord 11y ago
  It wasn't with those things - that's what they want you to do. It was appalling with developers of Twitter clients suddenly introducing harsher rate limiting, and a user cap per API key (meaning any growth in the app was severely limited, or even non-existent if already popular).
pp19dd 11y ago
So I have a feeling that starting next month they're basically gimping their API on purpose to drive developers toward GNIP, which they bought last year for $134 million. Developers who can afford it anyway, because GNIP is not cheap. There is a popular twitter API endpoint which is undocumented and unsupported, yet insanely popular due to its functionality. It's the tweet-count-for-URL one; ex: https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.voanews.com/content/philippines-woes-arms-manufacturers/2953923.html https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www... Twitter is now cancelling that endpoint (on 11/20) and recommending for thousands of developers to switch to their streams API for the functionality, which requires a program to maintain a constant socket connection and listen for filtered URLs to show up. Which, sure, that's a reasonable architecture for some cases. However, what used to be a simple API-query-for-a-known-URL is now going to be a daemon program running 24/7 for months and months that listens to all of twitter for all conversations about the base domain, and then tries to emulate a count.
- bvm 11y ago
  I heard a rumour they were forced into buying GNIP (which is a pretty unpleasant tech to work with) due to some uninvoiced bills on Twitter's side.
- marktangotango 11y ago
  If you find this useful, certainly others have, identify a need, fill it, profit....
  - jc4p 11y ago
    And run into issues when your API key gets ratelimited :)
- ahlatimer 11y ago
  If you're talking about switching to the free streams Twitter provides, good luck if you want to maintain a URL count for more than a handful of URLs. Streams actually IS the right product for what I wanted to do, but the limits are so low (I could maintain ~12 connections from a single IP) that I couldn't use it. They do have a site stream that would fit, but that's been in closed beta since it came out (2012 IIRC?) that is no longer accepting invitations and, according to the responses on their dev forums, is unlikely to be extended.
nanoojaboo 11y ago
Has Dorsey ever apologized to the 'developer' who co-created Twitter and got pushed out by Jack?
mschuster91 11y ago
First thing: remove those ridiculous usage limits for individual clients, so that anyone using a 3rd party app can use it like he wants and not having the app suddenly turned off because it reached 100k users.
gavanwoolery 11y ago
Twitter has huge, huge potential. To me it is 100x more useful than something like LinkedIn - even though this is not its purpose. I connect and interact with people in my industry (in an unobtrusive way). My reputation is my followers list. Twitter is already being used for this purpose (some actors and models value are now determined by the size of their follower base). And that is just one facet of its potential value. But...they really need to focus more both on the needs of their users, and even more so, developers. A simple example - I wanted to upload videos natively to Twitter (to surpass the limits that GIFs impose)+++. Its doable through an iPhone, but I no longer own one (+ you need to transfer the file to your iPhone, which is a bit of a hassle). I had to write my own script to accomplish this, and the API was anything but helpful in this process (I had to randomly tweak video settings until it would accept one of my videos). +++ (Note that this is different from simply linking a Youtube video - twitter videos are auto-expanded and auto-play, which makes a huge difference for interactions in my experience). GIF limit is 5 MB IIRC, and video limit is 15 MB (and 15 MB / 30 seconds of video lets you show so much more than a 5 MB GIF). Script is here if anyone needs it (designed to run on a Mac, requires TWURL and Ruby): http://pastebin.com/45h1mx8s http://pastebin.com/45h1mx8s
- mrweasel 11y ago
  So how much would you pay for access to Twitter? There's a ton of people who seem to know what Twitter needs to do, except it's never things that translate to profit. Take your own example with videos. It would be nice feature, but it's just costing Twitter even more money.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    I have some pretty good ideas how to profit from Twitter, the problem is that I can't trust them to let me do it. Who knows when they'll cut me off entirely? So I don't bother.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      No, what parent asked is how will Twitter profit...
volaski 11y ago
The type of "Developers" they're trying to reach is NOT people who want to build Twitter apps. That era is over and it ain't coming back. Rather, they're trying to reach the people who make mobile apps who need good analytics tools, crash reporting tools, etc. It's not even related to Twitter. Which is exactly why I am cautious about this. When Google gives away Google analytics for free, we trust that Google will rarely come after our small startup since they already have a very lucrative business model. We know that Google knows the risk of betraying their users is not worth the trouble (unless the opportunity is huge enough that they would actually want to take the risk, in which case it wouldn't matter anyway). In case of Twitter we don't have that trust. Even looking at Fabric, I really think--as of today--it's really THE best analytics/crash report tool out there for app developers, but I also tend to think it's a trojan horse. It's obvious they are trying to penetrate developer mindshare AND their apps through Fabric. When you use Digits, you're basically outsourcing your user database to Twitter. When you use crashlytics for your social app, you're giving away all your user behavior to Twitter. I just hope Fabric came from Google instead of Twitter, for the same reason I don't use Parse from Facebook.
baldajan 11y ago
I wish Dorsey's apology came with some real change, to their ToS for example and immediate reversal of bad decisions. Rather than just, tweet what would you like to see. Actions speak louder than words, no matter how small.
fapjacks 11y ago
I can't think of anything to say here except "Fuck you, dude".
mcantelon 11y ago
Nah, what Twitter really needs is moar ideology-based censorship. That'll fix evvverything.
deleted 11y ago
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Aissen 11y ago
Here are a few things Twitter could do to gain developers trust again: - re-open the firehose. Let more people access it, even Gnip's (now Twitter's) competitor. - remove the 100000+ users limit. Falcon Pro comes to mind, but since the author now works for Twitter, their are probably other good examples out there - let developers monetize their apps using Twitter; maybe by providing a shared ads model. That's not the end of it, but that would be a good start.
slater 11y ago
Now can they bring back RSS feeds?
IanDrake 11y ago
Twitter would have to decentralize their system to court developers again. That means creating a protocol and an open source server that implements the protocol. Twitter is basically an inverted email system anyway. So there is no technical reason why it can't be structured more like email. They could make money like google does with gmail, but as a user I could sign up with any provider or even host my own server. Then it might get interesting. To me the only thing twitter has of value is mind share ("tweet", "follow", etc...) and this approach is the only way they can leverage it to profit in the long run.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  twitter needs to monetize what it does best, like how linkedin monetize recruiters and 'influencers'
- webmaven 11y ago
  Yeah, my #helloworld ask is that they do this (for example by implementing OStatus).
  - webmaven 11y ago
    Link to my two #helloworld tweets: https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464 https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464 https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657640450879332354 https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657640450879332354
slackstation 11y ago
It wasn't as he said "confusing and unpredictable" it was manipulative and desperate. Let a bunch of developers figure out ways to monetize on Twitter then cut off their access and duplicate their strategies. Empty words. Let me know if they want to give contractual guarantees that certain APIs will be available.
- deleted 11y ago
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Xyik 11y ago
I thought CEOs were supposed to be decisive. Why don't I see anything actionable here.
waterlesscloud 11y ago
Sorry, Jack. I had a lot of ideas for leveraging your info 5 years ago. Still do, in fact. It's not like Twitter has done any of it. But. I. Simply. Can. Not. Trust. Twitter. So, enjoy your floundering.
mesozoic 11y ago
I'm sorry that you felt confused by your inability to understand our corporate decisions that were best for us at the time.
vegabook 11y ago
This company seems to be lurching from one PR disaster to another. I have never seriously developed a twitter API-based application because as long ago as 2012 the restrictions were already on the uptrend, and the writing was on the wall for anybody betting their application on the Twitter ecosystem. Throw in the declining quality of the average tweet and you have a recipe for a company which opened up a new Internet use case, but never capitalised on it (as others adopt its MO). It reminds me of Xerox Parc, in that in invented something awesome without really understanding what it had created, nor how to use it properly. In my view, Twitter = Yahoo. It won't die, it got there first, but it didn't really "get it", and so it will never win.
deleted 11y ago
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partiallypro 11y ago
Maybe they can stop screwing over smaller twitter apps with their stupidly expensive token threshold. Windows had quite a few good Twitter clients, like MetroTwit that Twitter put out of business simply because they priced them out with their token limits.
wmeredith 11y ago
Fool me once: shame on you. Fool me twice: shame on me.
nailer 11y ago
The sad thing is that, for a brief period in 2010-2012, the Twitter API was 'hello world' for new developers. Iterating over friends, getting statuses, etc. They had a great REST API and if you made a good thing you could sell it (and Twitter's ecosystem would benefit). Now nobody trusts them.
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
twitter tried to suspend me a week ago and demand my personal info... i told them i didn't have any, they reactivated my account and said to follow their rules... i deleted my account and told them to fire their CEO. and now they come crying back... too late, jack... get back in your box.
TheRealDunkirk 11y ago
"Forget it. I'll build my own Twitter. With hookers. And blackjack."
deleted 11y ago
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drawkbox 11y ago
Lose the developers, lose the platform. Dorsey is making a smart move here but can it be reversed? When twitter started and now when it is down they wanted/want developers, back when it went gangbusters they booted the devs. Engineering lost control of twitter internally, developer love was the first to go.
zmmmmm 11y ago
I hope they don't get away with this. As a developer, I want to see the Twitter story set a strong precedent that deters other companies from double crossing the developer community. Between Google+ (which paid a price for never letting developers on board at all) and Twitter (which prospered from their hard work and then betrayed them) I hope future companies will have a new understanding that if you want to be a platform for anything, embracing 3rd party developers and keeping faith with them has to be one of your top priorities.
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  If you base your business entirely on the API of another company, your entire business is at the mercy of that company and can be destroyed on a whim. This is especially true of free APIs though it also applies to paid ones.
  - idibidiart 11y ago
    .... and it is evil on the part of the company providing the API to copy features from the best apps written for that API and cut off those developers by simply amending their ToS to say that such and such is not allowed... after they've co-opted that feature.
    - JohnTHaller 11y ago
      Evil, standard industry practice. Pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to.
      - JohnTHaller 11y ago
        I think the tone of this comment was lost in translation. I'm not saying I agree with this practice, it's abhorrent. But it has happened enough times over the years that a company building something on top of a free API has to basically expect things to go south like this.
  - callumlocke 11y ago
chris_wot 11y ago
This is going to sound a bit churlish, but how does Twitter make money? Sure, there are some sponsorships, but what actual product do they sell?
- pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
  hmm... access to the locations and SMS messages of millions of people... who could possibly want to look at that? twitter sells you out to make every payroll. stay in the box, jack.
dasil003 11y ago
Sorry Jack, I believe in Twitter's future as a user, but I'll be damned if I give it one ounce of control over mine. That bridge is burnt. If you want us to trust you, go do another startup and toe the line from beginning to end. Because at this point, almost anything cool that Twitter does will be seen as a failure by current investors. Nothing short of being the next Facebook will satisfy them, and Facebook knows damn well it can't afford to try anything cool anymore.
metaphorm 11y ago
talk is cheap. until we see substantive change from Twitter, such as changing their ToS, or re-instating previously suspended apps, its all just talk. I don't think the community of developers should be willing to work with Twitter going forward. they blew it. they've done nothing to earn a "reset" in their developer relations. if anything their product now is significantly worse and less appealing to integrate with than it has been in the past.
DigitalSea 11y ago
Here we go again. How many times has Twitter sworn to change and treat developers with the respect they deserve? I've lost count. Actions speak louder than words, for starters Dorsey needs to amend those restrictive terms. Twitter is a great platform with a trove of data not only for research purposes, but for creating third party clients and more. It is time for Twitter and Dorsey to prove they've changed. Twitter will continue to fail without developer support. Look at how successful Facebook has been nurturing the developer community. Basically every site has a login with Facebook button now.
cowardlydragon 11y ago
Didn't they just fire a bunch of their own?
Animats 11y ago
QNX did something like this years ago. They had a free version, then went partially open source, then went closed source, then went fully open source (you could download the kernel sources), then suddenly went totally closed source after being acquired by Blackberry. There are few remaining QNX developers.
hoodoof 11y ago
This relationship has come to an end. It's not just that trust is now gone between Twitter and developers, it's that developers at around this time came to realise that building on someone else's platform always carries the risk that the CEO of the day will pull the rug. Or even worse, that some unnamed front line worker in the "app approvals departments" will pull the rug with no recourse. Twitter is foolish for trying to get this going again. The love affair ended, time for new things.
pm24601 11y ago
I stopped really looking at APIs ever since Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. started restricting the usefulness and access to them. Its been a long time since I really thought about building any business on quicksand. Now a days when I use an external API, I make sure it is not core to the product. If the relationship changes with the external provider, I need an escape that does not impact my product. Which means of course that the external API cannot be "essential" - and in startup land "not essential" == "do not do"
methehack 11y ago
I have found Michael Porter's Five Forces a useful tool when reasoning about supplier power. I think supplier power and how we respond to it is the interesting topic here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis#Bargaining_power_of_suppliers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis#Ba... In general, ya gotta be real careful. Somehow, you have to counteract the entity's supplier power with your very own buyer power. If you can't do that, you won't likely last. Or more specifically: whether or not you last will depend entirely on the other guy. It will have nothing to do with your own efforts (however vigorous), skill (however impressive), or cleverness (however clevererer). One thing I know is irrelevant: whether or not you think the company will act as a 'good citizen'. Thinking about a company as if it were a person has little predictive value. Thinking about a company as if its 'Hal' from 2001 -- now we're talkin'. More like a clever psycho no conscience AI on a secret mission that it views as way more important than whatever you happen to be doing with your Saturday's -- that's more like it. This applies twice to public companies (like, remarkably, twitter) as by that point everyone takes the fiduciary thing really very quite most seriously.
vph 11y ago
Personally, I have never trusted these social network companies in terms of working with/for the platforms. Sure, when they are in trouble, when they need developers, they will say things like this. And when they are strong, they will close up and can't care less about their developers. It's the same with Facebook, etc.
cheald 11y ago
Words are cheap. Until Twitter stops acting like "find someone using Twitter successfully and punch them in the face" is a business model, it's all just hot air. It's not good enough for Twitter to "reset" the relationship. That ship has sailed. There's going to have to be some serious groveling, wildly-generous concessions, and guarantees of integrity moving forward if they want to recapture what they once had. A little less conversation, a little more action please All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me A little more bite and a little less bark A little less fight and a little more spark Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me Satisfy me baby
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lnanek2 11y ago
Pretty empty apology. If they want to do something meaningful for developers, why don't they remove the user login token restrictions, for example? Several famously successful API using apps hit that and suffered. Just apologizing is pointless, you have to actually change the bad policies.
jpatel3 11y ago
He speaks like a manger in corporate..
blantonl 11y ago
Why do people feel they are entitled to perpetual API access? If you want to build your business on the back of someone else who is doing the heavy lifting, then don't be surprised when they rear up and no longer let you ride. Maybe Twitter should follow the lead that I do - those that license and use many of my APIs pay on a royalty model - they pay a certain percentage of all revenue that their platform generates. Period. I predict that Twitter will regress back to owning their platform after this minor blip.
jv22222 11y ago
Fool me once... (is said 7 times in these HN comments, wonder why)
xenadu02 11y ago
There is nothing about the 100,000 token limit that makes any sense. People present it as Twitter wanting to "control the core experience". That's bullshit and always has been. Twitter could have easily said "we will serve ads in this format. All apps that want to use the API must display the ads according to rules XYZ". Congrats! Now you can monetize and app developers can keep innovating. The whole Twitter client fiasco remains one of the dumbest moves and for nonsensical reasons that Twitter itself could have easily solved. I saw nothing in this announcement that addresses this problem or changes any policies related to it.
iamleppert 11y ago
A day late and a dollar short. I wouldn't be caught dead developing on their API ever again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Swift death be to you, Twitter.
oldpond 11y ago
So, why is there still only one "Twitter"? Why has it not been forked? Please enlighten me.
Urbanxassassin 11y ago
Not sorry for the layoffs?
randomsearch 11y ago
So here's what Twitter should do: 1. Allow devs to create third party twitter clients. No limits, no restrictions. The loss of dev trust is so big that they need to do something this huge. If they don't do this, I think Twitter will be forced to sell to a bigger company within 18 months. Allowing third party twitter clients will quickly kill the official clients, as they're a heap of junk from a UX POV. It doesn't matter that Twitter won't control that. People who think this matters seem to think that Twitter is another Facebook. I can't emphasise strongly enough that Twitter is not a Facebook. 2. Make money selling licenses to third parties for data analysis. Change the licensing and make it cheaper. Make it affordable for small developers. Encourage an explosion of innovation in the way tweets are used. Work with these people to offer a better structure for tweets that will help them develop their applications. Then you're the data provider for a huge ecosystem, with a feedback loop that ensures the data increases in value over time. People seem to not be able to find specific value in twitter's data, but I can see huge potential. Here are some no-brainer examples: - emergency management (this is being done, all over the world, and it works) - data-mining comments about companies for feedback. - recommendation services. I can think of much more valuable ideas, but as I know people working on startups in this area, I won't share them. I also don't understand why Twitter have not "app"-ed their platform or partitioned it so that companies can have their own subplatforms. Maybe it's because the official clients are terrible at handling such data. Man, I could go on... but what a challenge it will be to turn this mess into something meaningful.
webmaven 11y ago
Here is my request that they actually follow through on their original promise to federate with compatible implementations: https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464 https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464
- webmaven 11y ago
  And to be clear, implementing OStatus (http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/wiki/Main_Page http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/wiki/Main_Page) is probably the best way to move this forward.

474 points by jsnathan 11y ago

I think that horse may have bolted Jack. I am not sure a developer who had the rug pulled from under them once will take the risk of investing their time in the Twitter API again. Fool me once etc...

jedberg 11y ago

I think the picture in the article sums it up perfectly. It would be really hard to ever trust them again unless they were willing to put a contract in place with some sort of financial penalty to them. And even then I'm not sure I would trust them.

calcsam 11y ago
Here it is: https://twitter.com/jf/status/524412388745818113?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/jf/status/524412388745818113?ref_src=tws...
- kzhahou 11y ago
  "Ok, great job team, let's launch our new Twitter-based product today. Three...two...one...LAUNCH! <Access denied - TOS violation> AAAAARGH! Good grief!"
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

admax88q 11y ago

Nothing like an "apology" that doesn't apologize for the real wrongdoing. How I love corporate speak. "Our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable. We want to come to you today and apologize for the confusion." Yeah it was the "confusion" that was wrong. Nothing like apologizing but not admitting fault either. He's basically saying "we did the right thing, we just didn't communicate it clearly."

aikah 11y ago
You're absolutely right. they should have said "We apologize for the kind of relationship we developed with IT businesses building on top of Twitter". Because this apology is basically "We apologize if we hurt someone but we're not going to change our policies, merely fire the guy in charge".
bloaf 11y ago
"From now on, when we hose developers, we will do so in an unambiguous and predictable manner."
- troels 11y ago
  And it will be predictable indeed.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    "The cycle cannot be broken."
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Honestly that would at least be an improvement
- deleted 11y ago
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- Alupis 11y ago
  Why does it seem it's only Twitter with this problem? (or at least the most frequent and public). Twitter "hoses" developers all the time who were making money based on apps supporting Twitter. They "hose" the developer because Twitter would rather make that money instead of allowing others to, yet they then fail to capitalize on the vacuum they just created. Over time, it's made Twitter a seemingly very unattractive platform to try to dev against. Twitter doesn't make much in terms of earnings on their own, it seems it would be in their best interest to allow an ecosystem around their platform.

rebel 11y ago

It really seems like this is where you should have some sort of concrete contract/agreement to reassure developers. Without that, I can't see how anyone could trust them.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
especially when it comes from a temporary position ion the chart and tos clearly states tos can be changed unilaterally at any time https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/agreement-and-policy https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/agreement-and-policy

tacos 11y ago

If you're building a business on Twitter's back you're fuckin' nuts. Twitter can't even build a business on Twitter.

adventured 11y ago
Why isn't a $2+ billion sales run-rate with 50%+ annual growth a business? They'll match the sales that Salesforce had for fiscal 2014, within eight to ten quarters, even assuming slower growth.
- gaius 11y ago
  Because they are burning cash every quarter anyway? Anyone can buy revenue.
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  i got a great business, people give me 75 cents i give them a dollar, it scales infinitely, and has the potential for absolutely titanic revenue, interested in investing?
samstave 11y ago
They do make a damn good lunch though. They should pivot to a series of restaurants where you can only message positive reviews regarding the amazing food you just ate while surrounded by a lot of hot, young tech workers. Let the public access the THREE freaking floors of food in their HQ where each employee is required to act as a server (no pun) to customers for an hour or so a day. The menu is a stream you follow, and you reply with "@table10 orders the tataki, chicken and veggies" and the SRE (service restaurant enabler) delivers the food while describing Flock...

crabasa 11y ago

The single most important thing that Twitter can do to encourage developers to build on their platform is to completely and unambiguously align interests. If a developer is successful, Twitter should be successful, and vice versa. This is infinitely more reliable than any promise and is how all successful application platforms operate.

firasd 11y ago
Exactly. The problem isn’t that we can’t believe Dorsey’s intentions, it’s that Dorsey’s intentions don’t necessarily create the reality of Twitter’s future. Whether it’s Twitter or Facebook (or others), these companies will keep changing their product and business and thus consumers of their API will always be on quicksand.
vijayr 11y ago
That would be solid business sense. If developers are successful on Twitter's platform, they wouldn't easily leave for the next shiny thing. Customers also would benefit, as products won't disappear overnight because twitter cut off access. It is a win-win for everyone.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  But how do developers being successful on Twitter's platform translate to Twitter making money? Developers aren't really willing to pay for access to Twitter, and I don't think many of them want to show Twitter's ads, as that removes a way for them to make money by offering an ad free version, and makes offering their own ads that much less unpalatable.
  - billmalarky 11y ago
    >But how do developers being successful on Twitter's platform translate to Twitter making money? Same way 3rd party developers helped originally grow twitter. A variety of twitter 3rd party tools drives user engagement with twitter. That data most likely has value that twitter simply hasn't figured out how to extract efficiently yet (slapping ads in the feed is an easy monetization strategy, not necessarily a good one).

aikah 11y ago

Twitter and Facebook are 2 different products, the latter being a social network ,the former a "social network message bus" since relationships and streams are public by default. Well Twitter should embrace that fact instead pulling the plug on successful Twitter based products and offer paid plans for business who want to build on top of twitter.

dave_ops 11y ago
This is actually a good idea I think. Salesforce Chatter is a thing, and it sells well, and it's also terrible. An on-prem corporate twitter would actually be useful.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Karunamon 11y ago

Apology not accepted. Twitter tipped their hand here a long time ago - once the network got strong enough, start locking things down so those crazy devs don't do anything cool or interesting that you can't monetize, nevermind if it makes the user experience many times better.

raverbashing 11y ago
And of course it goes both ways, like Instagram preventing the pictures from showing on the twitter timeline (Not saying twitter didn't deserve this)

swang 11y ago

Translation: "We're too in the box to think outside of the box. So other developers please find a way to make Twitter popular again so we can steal that application[0], bar any other third-party from making anything related to that idea so we can be the sole monetizer of said application. [0] Application not being an "app", but more of a new way to use twitter.

jalfresi 11y ago
Absolutely! If any dev falls for this trap again then they need their head examined. Fool me once...

pavornyoh 11y ago

You only get one chance to make a first impression. Apologizing is a good step and most will forgive but never forget.

deveac 11y ago
>You only get one chance to make a first impression. Same problem they are facing with the massive number of users that tried Twitter and abandoned it. Much easier to acquire a new user than to re-acquire an old user that has already decided against.

vonklaus 11y ago

Anyone burned by twitter will think twice about working on it again, however it is likely too valuable of a platform to not give ample consideration to. I reckon twitter will merge with square and provide end-to-end advertising metrics for impressions --> clicks --> cart additions --> purchases. This will be valuable, and as much as I think twitter is silly, if they provide this they will do well. Platform companies with stroes: * Microsoft * Google Play * Apple * [ empty ] Super conflated and contrived appraisal here, but Twitter better post a strong offering in empty before facebook and they can't do that well without square and a platform or decentralized market. All this is to say, Twitter needs developers bad and to the extent they win them from Facebook and other platforms will be tied to the value they provide. I think that value will be provided by purchasing square in a merger of equals and building a dumb pipe platform, letting developers curate the content and providing stores. We'll see what developer sentiment is, first few comments lead me to beleive it is not great.

em0ney 11y ago
Interesting take on the future. I agree about the current state of developer sentiment. I think anyone who looks at a company like Microsoft will see that developer sentiment isn't static. Might take years for things to change but I commend them for taking the right first steps towards rectifying the situation.

deveac 11y ago

The tough thing is that the calculation developers make is a mixed bag of components that involves not just trust, but fiscal opportunity. People's fortunes and livelihoods are tied to developing for a platform. In some ways, this ship may have sailed. Might be a situation where even if devs find a way to regain some trust, the actual perceived value of the commitment these days isn't as alluring. The question is, what has fundamentally changed about Twitter's business model that has now re-aligned its incentives to better match those of the developer community to enable them to make this promise today? Anything?

muppetman 11y ago

Why would you bother to come back after being kicked in the teeth, to a platform that is now stagnating, showing little signs of growth and has no obvious revenue model for app developers? This is the cart before the horse. They need to fix Twitter so that people want to develop for it again, not say "Hey, here's this downtrodden mess, come and make it better for us!"

protomyth 11y ago

If they had announced that developers can make twitter client apps and display foreign services (e.g. instagram) in the same stream with the tweets without limit to the number of end users, I would be interested. I just assume this is a statement to the shareholders and will have very little effect on developers.

mmanfrin 11y ago

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...

gaius 11y ago
... Won't get fooled again.
hoodoof 11y ago
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ux3DKxxFoM

milge 11y ago

Too little, too late. But thanks for the important lesson of not building something on Twitter's platform when the rug can be pulled out from under you. That lesson applies to other platforms too.

GhotiFish 11y ago

This seems like it's almost too small of a world view. When twitter pulled the rug out, it informed a shift in thinking, everywhere. Not just with twitter. The wisdom became "Don't build your business on another one." and twitter was the primary example of why not. For twitter to turn around and say "Ok, we made some mistakes, and we want to develop that trust again." is misunderstanding what happened. twitter changed the conventional wisdom, not just wisdom about twitter.

mindcrime 11y ago
The wisdom became "Don't build your business on another one." That wisdom is WAY older than twitter. It may have become a fashionable meme again because of Twitter, but platform risk has been around probably about as long as computing. Certainly the idea goes back at least as far as the infamous DOS/Lotus 1-2-3 dustup. Google "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" for example. Note that whether or not Microsoft actually tried to break Lotus 1-2-3 isn't the point. I'm just saying people have been aware of, and talking about, these kinds of risks for a LONG time.
- GhotiFish 11y ago
  That's fair, it's that saying: "Everything old is new again".
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Well, new generations often needs new lessons. I'm from the generation that contains the majority of potential developers of sexy Twitter-based hot unicorn Uber-for-Cloud-Based-Social-Gardening startups and I haven't ever heard any stories about DOS/Lotus 1-2-3. Fortunately, Twitter made it up for us. "The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Startups rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory they are extinguished. Lotus were not the first. They did not create the Platform. They did not forge the APIs. They merely found them - the legacy of my kind." - Twitter CEO in my twisted imagination.

__e 11y ago

It's not just Twitter. Most popular APIs tend to regulate and constrain use as they grow popular. This has dissuaded developers, and certainly startups from building products on top of APIs. VCs do not like companies depending on third party APIs either, due to the fact that they may be arm twisted by the API service. Twitter's attitude towards developers is potentially impacting the uptake of libraries like Fabric, despite having nothing to do with their API. What Twitter may have a shot at, as a result of this effort is to get usage of their libraries like Fabric on par standing ground with libraries and products like Parse from Facebook.

1ris 11y ago
3-5 years ago everything had a API. No nothing has.

sgoraya 11y ago

The recent Standford ETL talk by Jeff Seibert (Senior Director of Product at Twitter) provides some insight into the development of the Twitter API's/SDK (Fabric). Overall, I thought it was one of the better and more practical talks. http://goo.gl/WfAiPU http://goo.gl/WfAiPU

SEJeff 11y ago

He should apologize a bit more sincerely to the developers he just laid off.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Oh, so another cycle starts. Here's a note I took back earlier, around the time of the original Twitter fiasco, pasted straight from my quotes file: * Sovereign from Mass Effect on using someone else's technology "Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it." Strangely, it seems to describe recent (2012/2013) situation with API of Twitter perfectly.

0xCMP 11y ago
I love the reference
bipin_nag 11y ago
Added to my quotes file. Thanks.
austinjp 11y ago
Feels a lot more like Amazon.
ISL 11y ago
Twitter could avoid this sentiment by making a fiscally-binding statement: "We have opened up our API, and have placed $5B in escrow with the Gates Foundation, who will return 70% of the investment income to Twitter. If we deny API access to developers before 2020, the Gates Foundation will keep the principal." Someone sufficiently clever could make a similar, but perpetual, statement.
- niyazpk 11y ago
  Wouldn't they need $5B lying around? Do they?
  - funkyy 11y ago
    You and your logic, making some good reasonable points.

at-fates-hands 11y ago

Well this article is a bit click baity. The original article they reference is from 2012 and talks about the API changes and Twitter's choice to shut down apps it feels are competing with its own app. All I got out of the current article was Jack trying to woo developers back without any hint of what exactly they're changing to be more developer friendly. If I was burned by them in 2012, I doubt this would get rid of any lingering doubts I had about working on their platform.

manghoti 11y ago

> Going forward, the company says it will improve its communication with developers. “We want to make sure that we have a great relationship with our developers, an open and honest relationship with our developers,” he said. I'm curious why this kind of language hasn't fallen out of favor. It sounds so completely empty to me, I have to assume it does for everyone else.

mcnamaratw 11y ago
It doesn't have to work on everybody. You only need a good solid group who hear what they want to hear.

libria 11y ago

Why are so many developers naive about this? Twitter has a responsibility to its employees & shareholders to turn a profit. In some stages, courting developers will make sense, and in others, not. A lot of developers are taking it like a jilted lover. This is a business relationship, and it is neither personal nor permanent. If you can build on their platform today, reap the success while it lasts. For some of you, that uncertainty is not worth the investment. Great! Just stop expecting Twitter to sacrifice business health to keep one group of partners happy.

mindcrime 11y ago
Twitter has a responsibility to its employees & shareholders to turn a profit Yes, but fucking over developers is not, generally speaking, a good way to accomplish that end! That's the sad thing about all of this... Twitter haven't just been hosing developers, they've been hosing themselves by destroying the ecosystem around Twitter, thereby making Twitter less valuable.
frabcus 11y ago
My problem with them is they refused to even talk. We had a plan that would make them money - they without notice just killed our API access. Why didn't they call us first? Fuck that, not going near them.
SirensOfTitan 11y ago
Twitter is a communication platform. Developers building on that platform is a great way to grow that platform, no? This is especially true in that Twitter's mobile app has been terrible for many years. As Facebook and Google put tremendous resources into mobile, Twitter relied on high quality 3rd party apps like TweetBot while at the same time put ridiculous restrictions on them: > Apps replicating Twitter’s core user experience (what we’ve called “traditional Twitter clients”) are discouraged and have a ceiling of 100,000 users, among other restrictions. Be sure to read the applicable TOS clauses carefully if you’re considering building such an app. If twitter is so financially unhealthy that supporting platform would topple their 'business health,' then maybe their health wasn't that good to start with.
11y ago

jaytaylor 11y ago

From TFA: Can developers trust Twitter this time? No. Don't get me wrong, back while working at Klout we got to meet Jack Dorsey and he is intelligent and interesting. Personally I like him and have some respect for him. With that said, CEO's don't stay forever so there are no guarantees about how long the reign of Jack will last. Since he won't always be in a position to make good on this promise, how can we trust? What is it actually worth? Where is the olive branch? Words sound nice but I've learned to pay more attention to actions. How about something like free firehose access or at least making it affordable for mere mortals? Just "turning the api back on" won't be enough to convince me to sink anymore dev time into $twtr.

15155 11y ago
> How about something like free firehose access "Nope, million bucks, besides, you couldn't possibly handle XX megabits of streaming data per second!!" Every conversation I've had with anyone at Twitter.
- mrweasel 11y ago
  That's not exactly unreasonable is it? There are companies that will pay for fire hose access, so it's clearly worth something. It's also their only real product.
mattzito 11y ago
Almost no one actually needs firehose access, and they charge accordingly (particularly since that's a huge chunk of their value). If you need programmatic access to data, the folks at Gnip will happily sell you the data you need, and at expensive-but-imo-reasonable rates.
unfunco 11y ago
Even if the firehose was affordable for mere mortals, those mere mortals would still need the funds to receive potentially hundreds of thousands of tweets per second (peak)) – which is a lot of bandwidth, persistent storage, processing cycles, etc – and that doesn't come cheap either. If someone can't afford access to the firehose, then my guess is that they can't afford the infrastructure to consume the data anyway.

michaelbuckbee 11y ago

The API Terms of Use haven't changed: https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms The most egregious of which continues to be: "Apps replicating Twitter’s core user experience (what we’ve called “traditional Twitter clients”) are discouraged and have a ceiling of 100,000 users, among other restrictions. Be sure to read the applicable TOS clauses carefully if you’re considering building such an app." This is really bad as "core user experience" is something open to a very wide degree of interpretation.

lemevi 11y ago
Yeah, until they revert this change, it doesn't matter and to be honest I doubt developers even care about Twitter anymore. I certainly don't.
guan 11y ago
I couldn’t find video of Dorsey’s remarks. Was there any hint that Twitter might relax those restrictions?
- killwhitey 11y ago
  Here's the video https://twitter.com/Flight/status/656882929923059713 https://twitter.com/Flight/status/656882929923059713
homulilly 11y ago
Yeah as long as this policy remains in effect nobody's going to get back on board.
chimeracoder 11y ago
I maintain the Twitter API client library for a popular language, and I have a love-hate relationship with the Twitter API. Parts of it are really nice, but sometimes I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole with the documentation. The example responses they provide are correct... except when they aren't. They use heterogenous JSON in their responses (silently replacing string literals with arrays, but only for some responses, etc.). They've added error codes without updating the docs for months on end (which sort of defeats the point of an error code - what use is it if you don't know what the error means?) The only way I'm notified of these changes is when people file bug reports with the library, and I always have to ask them to tell me the exact query that cause the error for them, because they're almost impossible to reproduce otherwise[0], and the API is so inconsistent that I can't try and manually search for similar responses that will cause the error. On the other hand, the Twitter API is a seamless[1] way to interface with an incredibly useful and powerful product, and it's a great source of data. I just wish the developer experience were seamless. [0] e.g. https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda/issues/82 https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda/issues/82 [1] Assuming your client library works, but I can't assume that if I'm the one responsible for maintaining it!

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pasbesoin 11y ago

Fool me once... I hope many people have instead learned to generalize the earlier message, in the last some years. Crudely but aptly stated: "Don't be a sharecropper."

catshirt 11y ago

this sounds like a fish flopping around on land, looking for purpose, and developers to help it make money

mcnamaratw 11y ago

I predict the "culture of chill" will lead to a substantial minority of younger developers wandering in and giving their stuff away for no benefit a second time. I mean ... you aren't ... mad ... bro? Of course not. We're cool. Glad we had this talk.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago

Hmm. So here's the problem. Company allows others to build cool things on top of it. Sounds good. Then others start making money from the stuff they build but Company isn't really making money and the others are selling because they are filling in Company's deficiencies around their product. So how do you fix it so Company makes more money? Kill the others. That's why the first wave of stuff died on Twitter's platform. So what's different now? Has Twitter figured out how to make money and fill in the gaps in Twitter? If they have then this could end up working out. If not, how could things be different this time around? Color me skeptical.

jeena 11y ago

Too late Twitter, https://github.com/jeena/Twittia https://github.com/jeena/Twittia is dead once and for all!

cruise02 11y ago

It's not officially Fall until Lucy pulls away the football.

f1nch3r 11y ago

That was quite the big city apology.

cft 11y ago

Does this apply to Meerkat ban for example?

MichaelGG 11y ago
Eh they need to prevent spammy apps like FB had to. Meerkat knew it was acting improperly but hey, "growth hacking".

hartator 11y ago

Stupid question, how was Twitter bad with external developers? I've built a few services using Twitter, Facebook and Google+ each time and I didn't have anything bad to say about Twitter, they were always the easiest to deal with.

OJFord 11y ago
It wasn't with those things - that's what they want you to do. It was appalling with developers of Twitter clients suddenly introducing harsher rate limiting, and a user cap per API key (meaning any growth in the app was severely limited, or even non-existent if already popular).

pp19dd 11y ago

So I have a feeling that starting next month they're basically gimping their API on purpose to drive developers toward GNIP, which they bought last year for $134 million. Developers who can afford it anyway, because GNIP is not cheap. There is a popular twitter API endpoint which is undocumented and unsupported, yet insanely popular due to its functionality. It's the tweet-count-for-URL one; ex: https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.voanews.com/content/philippines-woes-arms-manufacturers/2953923.html https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www... Twitter is now cancelling that endpoint (on 11/20) and recommending for thousands of developers to switch to their streams API for the functionality, which requires a program to maintain a constant socket connection and listen for filtered URLs to show up. Which, sure, that's a reasonable architecture for some cases. However, what used to be a simple API-query-for-a-known-URL is now going to be a daemon program running 24/7 for months and months that listens to all of twitter for all conversations about the base domain, and then tries to emulate a count.

bvm 11y ago
I heard a rumour they were forced into buying GNIP (which is a pretty unpleasant tech to work with) due to some uninvoiced bills on Twitter's side.
marktangotango 11y ago
If you find this useful, certainly others have, identify a need, fill it, profit....
- jc4p 11y ago
  And run into issues when your API key gets ratelimited :)
ahlatimer 11y ago
If you're talking about switching to the free streams Twitter provides, good luck if you want to maintain a URL count for more than a handful of URLs. Streams actually IS the right product for what I wanted to do, but the limits are so low (I could maintain ~12 connections from a single IP) that I couldn't use it. They do have a site stream that would fit, but that's been in closed beta since it came out (2012 IIRC?) that is no longer accepting invitations and, according to the responses on their dev forums, is unlikely to be extended.

nanoojaboo 11y ago

Has Dorsey ever apologized to the 'developer' who co-created Twitter and got pushed out by Jack?

mschuster91 11y ago

First thing: remove those ridiculous usage limits for individual clients, so that anyone using a 3rd party app can use it like he wants and not having the app suddenly turned off because it reached 100k users.

gavanwoolery 11y ago

Twitter has huge, huge potential. To me it is 100x more useful than something like LinkedIn - even though this is not its purpose. I connect and interact with people in my industry (in an unobtrusive way). My reputation is my followers list. Twitter is already being used for this purpose (some actors and models value are now determined by the size of their follower base). And that is just one facet of its potential value. But...they really need to focus more both on the needs of their users, and even more so, developers. A simple example - I wanted to upload videos natively to Twitter (to surpass the limits that GIFs impose)+++. Its doable through an iPhone, but I no longer own one (+ you need to transfer the file to your iPhone, which is a bit of a hassle). I had to write my own script to accomplish this, and the API was anything but helpful in this process (I had to randomly tweak video settings until it would accept one of my videos). +++ (Note that this is different from simply linking a Youtube video - twitter videos are auto-expanded and auto-play, which makes a huge difference for interactions in my experience). GIF limit is 5 MB IIRC, and video limit is 15 MB (and 15 MB / 30 seconds of video lets you show so much more than a 5 MB GIF). Script is here if anyone needs it (designed to run on a Mac, requires TWURL and Ruby): http://pastebin.com/45h1mx8s http://pastebin.com/45h1mx8s

mrweasel 11y ago
So how much would you pay for access to Twitter? There's a ton of people who seem to know what Twitter needs to do, except it's never things that translate to profit. Take your own example with videos. It would be nice feature, but it's just costing Twitter even more money.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  I have some pretty good ideas how to profit from Twitter, the problem is that I can't trust them to let me do it. Who knows when they'll cut me off entirely? So I don't bother.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    No, what parent asked is how will Twitter profit...

volaski 11y ago

The type of "Developers" they're trying to reach is NOT people who want to build Twitter apps. That era is over and it ain't coming back. Rather, they're trying to reach the people who make mobile apps who need good analytics tools, crash reporting tools, etc. It's not even related to Twitter. Which is exactly why I am cautious about this. When Google gives away Google analytics for free, we trust that Google will rarely come after our small startup since they already have a very lucrative business model. We know that Google knows the risk of betraying their users is not worth the trouble (unless the opportunity is huge enough that they would actually want to take the risk, in which case it wouldn't matter anyway). In case of Twitter we don't have that trust. Even looking at Fabric, I really think--as of today--it's really THE best analytics/crash report tool out there for app developers, but I also tend to think it's a trojan horse. It's obvious they are trying to penetrate developer mindshare AND their apps through Fabric. When you use Digits, you're basically outsourcing your user database to Twitter. When you use crashlytics for your social app, you're giving away all your user behavior to Twitter. I just hope Fabric came from Google instead of Twitter, for the same reason I don't use Parse from Facebook.

baldajan 11y ago

I wish Dorsey's apology came with some real change, to their ToS for example and immediate reversal of bad decisions. Rather than just, tweet what would you like to see. Actions speak louder than words, no matter how small.

fapjacks 11y ago

I can't think of anything to say here except "Fuck you, dude".

mcantelon 11y ago

Nah, what Twitter really needs is moar ideology-based censorship. That'll fix evvverything.

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Aissen 11y ago

Here are a few things Twitter could do to gain developers trust again: - re-open the firehose. Let more people access it, even Gnip's (now Twitter's) competitor. - remove the 100000+ users limit. Falcon Pro comes to mind, but since the author now works for Twitter, their are probably other good examples out there - let developers monetize their apps using Twitter; maybe by providing a shared ads model. That's not the end of it, but that would be a good start.

slater 11y ago

Now can they bring back RSS feeds?

IanDrake 11y ago

Twitter would have to decentralize their system to court developers again. That means creating a protocol and an open source server that implements the protocol. Twitter is basically an inverted email system anyway. So there is no technical reason why it can't be structured more like email. They could make money like google does with gmail, but as a user I could sign up with any provider or even host my own server. Then it might get interesting. To me the only thing twitter has of value is mind share ("tweet", "follow", etc...) and this approach is the only way they can leverage it to profit in the long run.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
twitter needs to monetize what it does best, like how linkedin monetize recruiters and 'influencers'
webmaven 11y ago
Yeah, my #helloworld ask is that they do this (for example by implementing OStatus).
- webmaven 11y ago
  Link to my two #helloworld tweets: https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464 https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464 https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657640450879332354 https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657640450879332354

slackstation 11y ago

It wasn't as he said "confusing and unpredictable" it was manipulative and desperate. Let a bunch of developers figure out ways to monetize on Twitter then cut off their access and duplicate their strategies. Empty words. Let me know if they want to give contractual guarantees that certain APIs will be available.

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Xyik 11y ago

I thought CEOs were supposed to be decisive. Why don't I see anything actionable here.

waterlesscloud 11y ago

Sorry, Jack. I had a lot of ideas for leveraging your info 5 years ago. Still do, in fact. It's not like Twitter has done any of it. But. I. Simply. Can. Not. Trust. Twitter. So, enjoy your floundering.

mesozoic 11y ago

I'm sorry that you felt confused by your inability to understand our corporate decisions that were best for us at the time.

vegabook 11y ago

This company seems to be lurching from one PR disaster to another. I have never seriously developed a twitter API-based application because as long ago as 2012 the restrictions were already on the uptrend, and the writing was on the wall for anybody betting their application on the Twitter ecosystem. Throw in the declining quality of the average tweet and you have a recipe for a company which opened up a new Internet use case, but never capitalised on it (as others adopt its MO). It reminds me of Xerox Parc, in that in invented something awesome without really understanding what it had created, nor how to use it properly. In my view, Twitter = Yahoo. It won't die, it got there first, but it didn't really "get it", and so it will never win.

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partiallypro 11y ago

Maybe they can stop screwing over smaller twitter apps with their stupidly expensive token threshold. Windows had quite a few good Twitter clients, like MetroTwit that Twitter put out of business simply because they priced them out with their token limits.

wmeredith 11y ago

Fool me once: shame on you. Fool me twice: shame on me.

nailer 11y ago

The sad thing is that, for a brief period in 2010-2012, the Twitter API was 'hello world' for new developers. Iterating over friends, getting statuses, etc. They had a great REST API and if you made a good thing you could sell it (and Twitter's ecosystem would benefit). Now nobody trusts them.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

twitter tried to suspend me a week ago and demand my personal info... i told them i didn't have any, they reactivated my account and said to follow their rules... i deleted my account and told them to fire their CEO. and now they come crying back... too late, jack... get back in your box.

TheRealDunkirk 11y ago

"Forget it. I'll build my own Twitter. With hookers. And blackjack."

deleted 11y ago

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drawkbox 11y ago

Lose the developers, lose the platform. Dorsey is making a smart move here but can it be reversed? When twitter started and now when it is down they wanted/want developers, back when it went gangbusters they booted the devs. Engineering lost control of twitter internally, developer love was the first to go.

zmmmmm 11y ago

I hope they don't get away with this. As a developer, I want to see the Twitter story set a strong precedent that deters other companies from double crossing the developer community. Between Google+ (which paid a price for never letting developers on board at all) and Twitter (which prospered from their hard work and then betrayed them) I hope future companies will have a new understanding that if you want to be a platform for anything, embracing 3rd party developers and keeping faith with them has to be one of your top priorities.

JohnTHaller 11y ago
If you base your business entirely on the API of another company, your entire business is at the mercy of that company and can be destroyed on a whim. This is especially true of free APIs though it also applies to paid ones.
- idibidiart 11y ago
  .... and it is evil on the part of the company providing the API to copy features from the best apps written for that API and cut off those developers by simply amending their ToS to say that such and such is not allowed... after they've co-opted that feature.
  - JohnTHaller 11y ago
    Evil, standard industry practice. Pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to.
    - JohnTHaller 11y ago
      I think the tone of this comment was lost in translation. I'm not saying I agree with this practice, it's abhorrent. But it has happened enough times over the years that a company building something on top of a free API has to basically expect things to go south like this.
- callumlocke 11y ago

chris_wot 11y ago

This is going to sound a bit churlish, but how does Twitter make money? Sure, there are some sponsorships, but what actual product do they sell?

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
hmm... access to the locations and SMS messages of millions of people... who could possibly want to look at that? twitter sells you out to make every payroll. stay in the box, jack.

dasil003 11y ago

Sorry Jack, I believe in Twitter's future as a user, but I'll be damned if I give it one ounce of control over mine. That bridge is burnt. If you want us to trust you, go do another startup and toe the line from beginning to end. Because at this point, almost anything cool that Twitter does will be seen as a failure by current investors. Nothing short of being the next Facebook will satisfy them, and Facebook knows damn well it can't afford to try anything cool anymore.

metaphorm 11y ago

talk is cheap. until we see substantive change from Twitter, such as changing their ToS, or re-instating previously suspended apps, its all just talk. I don't think the community of developers should be willing to work with Twitter going forward. they blew it. they've done nothing to earn a "reset" in their developer relations. if anything their product now is significantly worse and less appealing to integrate with than it has been in the past.

DigitalSea 11y ago

Here we go again. How many times has Twitter sworn to change and treat developers with the respect they deserve? I've lost count. Actions speak louder than words, for starters Dorsey needs to amend those restrictive terms. Twitter is a great platform with a trove of data not only for research purposes, but for creating third party clients and more. It is time for Twitter and Dorsey to prove they've changed. Twitter will continue to fail without developer support. Look at how successful Facebook has been nurturing the developer community. Basically every site has a login with Facebook button now.

cowardlydragon 11y ago

Didn't they just fire a bunch of their own?

Animats 11y ago

QNX did something like this years ago. They had a free version, then went partially open source, then went closed source, then went fully open source (you could download the kernel sources), then suddenly went totally closed source after being acquired by Blackberry. There are few remaining QNX developers.

hoodoof 11y ago

This relationship has come to an end. It's not just that trust is now gone between Twitter and developers, it's that developers at around this time came to realise that building on someone else's platform always carries the risk that the CEO of the day will pull the rug. Or even worse, that some unnamed front line worker in the "app approvals departments" will pull the rug with no recourse. Twitter is foolish for trying to get this going again. The love affair ended, time for new things.

pm24601 11y ago

I stopped really looking at APIs ever since Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. started restricting the usefulness and access to them. Its been a long time since I really thought about building any business on quicksand. Now a days when I use an external API, I make sure it is not core to the product. If the relationship changes with the external provider, I need an escape that does not impact my product. Which means of course that the external API cannot be "essential" - and in startup land "not essential" == "do not do"

methehack 11y ago

I have found Michael Porter's Five Forces a useful tool when reasoning about supplier power. I think supplier power and how we respond to it is the interesting topic here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis#Bargaining_power_of_suppliers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis#Ba... In general, ya gotta be real careful. Somehow, you have to counteract the entity's supplier power with your very own buyer power. If you can't do that, you won't likely last. Or more specifically: whether or not you last will depend entirely on the other guy. It will have nothing to do with your own efforts (however vigorous), skill (however impressive), or cleverness (however clevererer). One thing I know is irrelevant: whether or not you think the company will act as a 'good citizen'. Thinking about a company as if it were a person has little predictive value. Thinking about a company as if its 'Hal' from 2001 -- now we're talkin'. More like a clever psycho no conscience AI on a secret mission that it views as way more important than whatever you happen to be doing with your Saturday's -- that's more like it. This applies twice to public companies (like, remarkably, twitter) as by that point everyone takes the fiduciary thing really very quite most seriously.

vph 11y ago

Personally, I have never trusted these social network companies in terms of working with/for the platforms. Sure, when they are in trouble, when they need developers, they will say things like this. And when they are strong, they will close up and can't care less about their developers. It's the same with Facebook, etc.

cheald 11y ago

Words are cheap. Until Twitter stops acting like "find someone using Twitter successfully and punch them in the face" is a business model, it's all just hot air. It's not good enough for Twitter to "reset" the relationship. That ship has sailed. There's going to have to be some serious groveling, wildly-generous concessions, and guarantees of integrity moving forward if they want to recapture what they once had. A little less conversation, a little more action please All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me A little more bite and a little less bark A little less fight and a little more spark Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me Satisfy me baby

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lnanek2 11y ago

Pretty empty apology. If they want to do something meaningful for developers, why don't they remove the user login token restrictions, for example? Several famously successful API using apps hit that and suffered. Just apologizing is pointless, you have to actually change the bad policies.

jpatel3 11y ago

He speaks like a manger in corporate..

blantonl 11y ago

Why do people feel they are entitled to perpetual API access? If you want to build your business on the back of someone else who is doing the heavy lifting, then don't be surprised when they rear up and no longer let you ride. Maybe Twitter should follow the lead that I do - those that license and use many of my APIs pay on a royalty model - they pay a certain percentage of all revenue that their platform generates. Period. I predict that Twitter will regress back to owning their platform after this minor blip.

jv22222 11y ago

Fool me once... (is said 7 times in these HN comments, wonder why)

xenadu02 11y ago

There is nothing about the 100,000 token limit that makes any sense. People present it as Twitter wanting to "control the core experience". That's bullshit and always has been. Twitter could have easily said "we will serve ads in this format. All apps that want to use the API must display the ads according to rules XYZ". Congrats! Now you can monetize and app developers can keep innovating. The whole Twitter client fiasco remains one of the dumbest moves and for nonsensical reasons that Twitter itself could have easily solved. I saw nothing in this announcement that addresses this problem or changes any policies related to it.

iamleppert 11y ago

A day late and a dollar short. I wouldn't be caught dead developing on their API ever again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Swift death be to you, Twitter.

oldpond 11y ago

So, why is there still only one "Twitter"? Why has it not been forked? Please enlighten me.

Urbanxassassin 11y ago

Not sorry for the layoffs?

randomsearch 11y ago

So here's what Twitter should do: 1. Allow devs to create third party twitter clients. No limits, no restrictions. The loss of dev trust is so big that they need to do something this huge. If they don't do this, I think Twitter will be forced to sell to a bigger company within 18 months. Allowing third party twitter clients will quickly kill the official clients, as they're a heap of junk from a UX POV. It doesn't matter that Twitter won't control that. People who think this matters seem to think that Twitter is another Facebook. I can't emphasise strongly enough that Twitter is not a Facebook. 2. Make money selling licenses to third parties for data analysis. Change the licensing and make it cheaper. Make it affordable for small developers. Encourage an explosion of innovation in the way tweets are used. Work with these people to offer a better structure for tweets that will help them develop their applications. Then you're the data provider for a huge ecosystem, with a feedback loop that ensures the data increases in value over time. People seem to not be able to find specific value in twitter's data, but I can see huge potential. Here are some no-brainer examples: - emergency management (this is being done, all over the world, and it works) - data-mining comments about companies for feedback. - recommendation services. I can think of much more valuable ideas, but as I know people working on startups in this area, I won't share them. I also don't understand why Twitter have not "app"-ed their platform or partitioned it so that companies can have their own subplatforms. Maybe it's because the official clients are terrible at handling such data. Man, I could go on... but what a challenge it will be to turn this mess into something meaningful.

webmaven 11y ago

Here is my request that they actually follow through on their original promise to federate with compatible implementations: https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464 https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464

webmaven 11y ago
And to be clear, implementing OStatus (http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/wiki/Main_Page http://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/wiki/Main_Page) is probably the best way to move this forward.