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The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem. The attacked the very developers and companies that taught people how to use Twitter

by electic 10y ago

The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem. The attacked the very developers and companies that taught people how to use Twitter and developed solutions that made it a viable use case. Without those myriad of solutions built upon it, Twitter is a very basic SMS broadcast medium. It has a sloppy unsegmented home feed full of noise and its mechanics are horrible so it does a poor job of burying hate. With that in mind, the numbers show. The people that get it are on it. Most of the rest of us just see glimmers of it embedded in news articles. Sadly, it is too late to reverse this. Trust has been lost.

rch 10y ago
Maybe Twilio could buy Twitter, if the price was rational.
- nols 10y ago
  Twitter is currently worth 3 times Twilio, that would be a dramatic deal.
  - rch 10y ago
    It would be dramatic tomorrow, but maybe not in a couple of years when Twilio's identity business is more mature.
- debacle 10y ago
  Twilio could make Twitter for less than what it would cost just to negotiate the deal.
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    We could have made Twitter with the time sunk into this HN thread. But that's irrelevant.
nateberkopec 10y ago
Twitter had to kill their ecosystem in order to make any money on advertising. There was just no way to sell ads if so many users were going to be using 3rd party clients. You may be right that killing off the 3rd party ecosystem hurt their usage, but from a business perspective, there wasn't any point keeping it if it was damaging their business model.
- electic 10y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12516190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12516190
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Not really. The vast majority of their ads are in the timeline. I don't see why they couldn't just serve those to third party developers. If the third parties try to block or prevent them then you revoke their API keys. Done.
  - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
    I dunno, I think to do that they'd have to have an Apple App Store level of oversight on their third party devs products, which would be about as restrictive to the devs as the changes they actually did make, plus prohibitively expensive for Twitter.
    - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      Seems doable. They have over 3,500 people there (really don't see why they're not at, say, 150). Surely they have enough resources to handle the necessary oversight. I would imagine most could be automated with spot checking by actual people.
    - lnanek2 10y ago
      That's not true at all. As someone who had multiple Twitter API apps killed by them, I would have welcome app store level review processes. Limiting tokens (killing any popular app) and killing games that let you tweet easily because they are too much like general purpose clients like they did was just ridiculous. The best apps I know, like Foursquare, just switched back to asking users for username and password at the time because the token limitation basically broke integration.
mrweasel 10y ago
>The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem I honestly don't think that matters that much. Yes it sucked to be the developer of a profitable Twitter client, but from Twitters point of view, those clients where potentially in the way of profit. Unless Twitter charged the third party clients for access to their API, how where they suppose to help Twitter make money? Increased user based? If Twitter can't make money on the users they have now, getting more won't help them. So many people claim that love Twitter, it's their only source news, the way they keep in contact and so on. Fine, pay Twitter $20 per year, that seem reasonable, and it would keep spammers and trolls of Twitter.
- electic 10y ago
  You are viewing the 3rd party clients as a negative. This was their greatest asset. Instead of destroying them, why not give them an SDK? If they put that SDK to show promoted tweets and other adverts in the stream, they could have sold far more inventory and still have all the metrics they need to show advertisers. Instead, they destroyed them, destroyed the user growth they provided, destroyed the engagement they provided, and worse destroyed far more earnings potential they could have had if they instead just worked with all the clients to get the ad placements in there. They tried to copy Facebook and how they did things, but instead destroyed their most prized asset.
  - mrweasel 10y ago
    The SDK would only be able to show the advertisers that the ads where pushed to the clients, not that it was actually shown. So I doubt that would sit well with advertisers. Even if tracking normal online ads is just as sketchy. Still don't feel it like would have made much of a difference. Twitter still have more than enough traffic, on which is fails to monetize. And again, what's wrong with paying for Twitter? $20 per year for personal account, $300 for businesses.
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      The SDK would only be able to show the advertisers that the ads where pushed to the clients, not that it was actually shown. The apps themselves wouldn't have been anonymous. If many of one's ads were seen through TwitView3000, one might have had reason to examine TwitView3000 to see how ads were handled in that app. If one had discovered that ads were dropped, a single phone call would have been enough to revoke the app's API key.
tlogan 10y ago
I came here just to say the exactly same thing. Back in 2008 (or so), I was under impression that Twitter will be become "informational highway": all messages will go thru their pipe. Something like world wide message queue. Twitter website and Twitter mobile app would be just one of many views to that pipe. And people had crazy ideas how to make something like Slack on top of Twitter, payment systems, voting, encrypted channels, integration with games, apps for customer support, etc. But, now, Twitter is just a social web app very similar to other social networks but without no clear advantage over others.

by electic 10y ago

rch 10y ago

Maybe Twilio could buy Twitter, if the price was rational.

nols 10y ago
Twitter is currently worth 3 times Twilio, that would be a dramatic deal.
- rch 10y ago
  It would be dramatic tomorrow, but maybe not in a couple of years when Twilio's identity business is more mature.
debacle 10y ago
Twilio could make Twitter for less than what it would cost just to negotiate the deal.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  We could have made Twitter with the time sunk into this HN thread. But that's irrelevant.

nateberkopec 10y ago

Twitter had to kill their ecosystem in order to make any money on advertising. There was just no way to sell ads if so many users were going to be using 3rd party clients. You may be right that killing off the 3rd party ecosystem hurt their usage, but from a business perspective, there wasn't any point keeping it if it was damaging their business model.

electic 10y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12516190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12516190
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Not really. The vast majority of their ads are in the timeline. I don't see why they couldn't just serve those to third party developers. If the third parties try to block or prevent them then you revoke their API keys. Done.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  I dunno, I think to do that they'd have to have an Apple App Store level of oversight on their third party devs products, which would be about as restrictive to the devs as the changes they actually did make, plus prohibitively expensive for Twitter.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    Seems doable. They have over 3,500 people there (really don't see why they're not at, say, 150). Surely they have enough resources to handle the necessary oversight. I would imagine most could be automated with spot checking by actual people.
  - lnanek2 10y ago
    That's not true at all. As someone who had multiple Twitter API apps killed by them, I would have welcome app store level review processes. Limiting tokens (killing any popular app) and killing games that let you tweet easily because they are too much like general purpose clients like they did was just ridiculous. The best apps I know, like Foursquare, just switched back to asking users for username and password at the time because the token limitation basically broke integration.

mrweasel 10y ago

>The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem I honestly don't think that matters that much. Yes it sucked to be the developer of a profitable Twitter client, but from Twitters point of view, those clients where potentially in the way of profit. Unless Twitter charged the third party clients for access to their API, how where they suppose to help Twitter make money? Increased user based? If Twitter can't make money on the users they have now, getting more won't help them. So many people claim that love Twitter, it's their only source news, the way they keep in contact and so on. Fine, pay Twitter $20 per year, that seem reasonable, and it would keep spammers and trolls of Twitter.

electic 10y ago
You are viewing the 3rd party clients as a negative. This was their greatest asset. Instead of destroying them, why not give them an SDK? If they put that SDK to show promoted tweets and other adverts in the stream, they could have sold far more inventory and still have all the metrics they need to show advertisers. Instead, they destroyed them, destroyed the user growth they provided, destroyed the engagement they provided, and worse destroyed far more earnings potential they could have had if they instead just worked with all the clients to get the ad placements in there. They tried to copy Facebook and how they did things, but instead destroyed their most prized asset.
- mrweasel 10y ago
  The SDK would only be able to show the advertisers that the ads where pushed to the clients, not that it was actually shown. So I doubt that would sit well with advertisers. Even if tracking normal online ads is just as sketchy. Still don't feel it like would have made much of a difference. Twitter still have more than enough traffic, on which is fails to monetize. And again, what's wrong with paying for Twitter? $20 per year for personal account, $300 for businesses.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    The SDK would only be able to show the advertisers that the ads where pushed to the clients, not that it was actually shown. The apps themselves wouldn't have been anonymous. If many of one's ads were seen through TwitView3000, one might have had reason to examine TwitView3000 to see how ads were handled in that app. If one had discovered that ads were dropped, a single phone call would have been enough to revoke the app's API key.

tlogan 10y ago

I came here just to say the exactly same thing. Back in 2008 (or so), I was under impression that Twitter will be become "informational highway": all messages will go thru their pipe. Something like world wide message queue. Twitter website and Twitter mobile app would be just one of many views to that pipe. And people had crazy ideas how to make something like Slack on top of Twitter, payment systems, voting, encrypted channels, integration with games, apps for customer support, etc. But, now, Twitter is just a social web app very similar to other social networks but without no clear advantage over others.