11 ms·
This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destinati
by crabasa 10y ago
This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app.
They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powering this backbone.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wehadfun 10y agoHow much would companies pay for access to this API?
- wslh 10y agoCompanies are paying a lot, the problem is that you don't have a lower tier. Just to compare, in AdWords you can pay $ 5 if you want, you are not forced to have a budget of a thousands. AdWords was revolutionary in that aspect, before them you needed to have a budget for advertising in Yahoo or other networks. I think Twitter didn't want to deal with small customers, indeed nobody wants to operate small accounts but if AdWords did it several years before Twitter, why did they never learn?
- rch 10y agoThe problem with monetizing the Twitter stream is that you need rather a lot of data, often in real time, to do much of anything. So the minimum useful tier is accordingly expensive to provide.
- criddell 10y agoThe depressing thing for me is to know that when they show me a Starbucks ad, Twitter makes pennies for that. I would much rather just pay those pennies myself and not see ads.
- Klathmon 10y agoI feel a bit like a shill because of how much I bring it up, but checkout Google Contributor[0]. It lets you pay a specific amount per month (IIRC from $2 to $15 or so) that you use to "bid" for ads spots just like the advertisers. If you win, then you'll see whatever you choose in place of the ad. Any money left over at the end of the month is refunded. It won't help you in the twitter case, but it does remove a good amount of ads across the net, and it even has controls that you can go in and whitelist/blacklist some websites from receiving contributions, as well as a full breakdown of where your money is going. I've removed 16,000 ads since I signed up in april 2015 [0]https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
- criddell 10y agoI signed up for $5 / month, but I also run an adblocker for performance and security reasons. I don't usually use the $5.
- Klathmon 10y agoYeah, if you block the ads they will never show, so you won't be paying the site operator for the ad spots.
- sunnyps 10y agoI think you're underselling Google Contributor by not mentioning its killer feature: replacing banner ads with cat photos.
- wslh 10y agoYou can summarize interesting information and charge for that.
- sigmar 10y agoI think you are right. I was thinking yesterday how much I wish there were comment sections at the bottom of news articles that consisted of twitter posts (like how facebook has plugins for a comment field). It would make sharing the article or commenting thoughts very easy.
- proksoup 10y agoThey became the defacto place for public discussion instead. The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe? Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?
- ProAm 10y ago> They became the defacto place for public discussion instead. I've always view Twitter as the commerical break and news teasers for the internet. I rarely see good thorough discussions on Twitter especially anything expected to last more than 30 hours of relevance.
- stupidcar 10y agoThey could have kept the 140-char service as a free service, to raise the profile of their brand. And it probably would have been more successful without the increasingly desperate attempts to "monetise" it by stuffing your timeline with keyword-based advertising. Meanwhile, every app or website with a messaging or notification function could have been using (and paying for) Twitter's API and infrastructure underneath. And all using a single Twitter account, so that every subscription to any of their customers' services would be a new account for them. It could have been a great business model, but their leadership did have the imagination to try anything other than keyword advertising.
- proksoup 10y agoAnd they would have given up control of the experience, and the types of discussion and interaction would have been different, and the "X and Y fought on twitter last night" would have become "X and Y fought on Zthingthatintegrates with twitter" instead.
- mc32 10y agoIt's where famous and infamous people go to boast and to brownnose each other and score points. It's a forum to continue high school style social interaction (peer pressure and peer approvals) Or, as nirvana said, territorial pissings. It's also good as a breaking news medium.
- dilap 10y agoEven in their own product, they kept deemphasizing the messaging aspect of it -- from small things like timeline filtering & reordering to large things like Moments.
- omouse 10y agoTwitter should be owned as a worldwide co-operative at this point, it's too useful as infrastructure to hand it over to some greedy jackasses.
- bernardlunn 10y agoBut it is too expensive now for that route
- tarancato 10y agoI wonder how cheaper would it be if tweets were removed in, let's say, six months.
- SwellJoe 10y agoThis election has proven the value of old tweets; as one candidate in particular has a penchant for making shit up, and then pretending later he didn't make shit up. That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and temporary medium, like a conversation rather than an article or book. Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.
- the_watcher 10y ago> Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte. Tweets contain photos, videos, gifs, etc. Text is far from the only things that would need to be stored.
- SwellJoe 10y agoHow many tweets contain media? On my timeline it is a very, very small percentage.
- aembleton 10y agoHow would you monetise the backbone? At least with the website/app they can use advertising.
- bernardlunn 10y agoIt would let the apps on top figure that out and they take a rev share
- true_religion 10y agoCharge people who build applications that use it in any significant way beyond sending text messages through the Twitter approved interface.
- iainmerrick 10y agoWould the pricing be per app, or per user? If you charge per user, it's unaffordable for small developers (unless they push the cost on to their users). If you charge per app, you won't make enough money for it to be worthwhile.
- true_religion 10y agoI'd charge per user, because as you said... small developers can push the cost onto their users.
- intrasight 10y agoTwilio has managed to find a way
- criddell 10y agoGPS is out there for anybody to use for free. It's incredibly useful and the value to the economy of having that there as a utility anybody can use is huge. Perhaps Twitter as a utility could be just as valuable. Maybe it doesn't need to be monetized.
- 10y ago
- bernardlunn 10y agoMessaging backbone decision would have sidestepped the backlash against online advertising. They made the wrong decision and are paying for it.
- jimmytidey 10y agoWe still need the thing that Twitter ought to have been, a public short messaging service. Who is going to step up? What kind of institution could deliver something like that, while remaining open and accountable? A Wikipedia style foundation? My guess is that it needn't be (too) expensive to run, especially if you hand over responsibility for long term storage of the messages to third parties. My PhD (in progress) is based on the public utility of Twitter data. I'm deeply sad about this.
- paulmd 10y agoThis is exactly the problem that XMPP is designed to solve. You pick an XMPP provider who you trust, and you can get cross-provider traffic through XMPP Federation. One of the largest XMPP providers is Google Talk, which lets you hook right into the standard GChat. The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols that keep getting built out, we just need people to implement XMPP.
- otterley 10y agoHow do you propose to prevent spam and abuse of this open federated chat network?
- paulmd 10y agoRealistically it would have to work the same way as spam filtering does for email. Come to think of it, it's surprising that spamming is not more prevalent on SMS networks, because it's the same kind of federated system. But I guess access may be gated well enough and enforcement strong enough to prevent that.
- LeoPanthera 10y agoSMS spam is common in Europe.
- orf 10y ago
- Alex3917 10y agoEliminating 3rd-party devs was only half the issue, the other half was the lack of velocity. I've been saying for a while now that my cofounder and I add more functionality to our startup every two weeks than Twitter's 4,000 employees add to theirs in an entire year. Now this is obviously an apples-and-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, yet all caveats aside I think it's still pretty telling.
- oldmanjay 10y agoMostly it tells us that you don't have any visibility into twitter and have conflated end-user features with engineering output.
- Alex3917 10y ago"Now this is obviously an apples-and-oranges comparison for all sorts of reasons, yet all caveats aside"
- blackaspen 10y agoYour startup has over 300 million users? Operating at scale is functionality that requires a lot more work than a lot of people sometimes realize.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- paulcole 10y ago> my cofounder and I add more functionality to our startup every two weeks than Twitter's 4,000 employees add to theirs in an entire year. There was just a discussion of a closely related topic a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314 > I think it's still pretty telling Huh? Telling of what? That you don't have a good grasp on what's going on at Twitter?
- jondubois 10y agoIt's easy to speculate on what could have been but we shoudn't forget that Twitter actually did exceptionally well for itself. I personally could never have imagined that Twitter would become so popular. I'm still surprised that people are using it (the whole thing doesn't make any sense to me).
- the_watcher 10y agoIt doesn't make sense until you find an active community around a topic you are truly interested in. The NBA is what sucked me in, and it remains 95% of the reason I used Twitter (the other 5% is for when customer service is unresponsive to my chats or emails)
- throwaway40483 10y agoFacebook = people you (grudgingly) know Twitter = people you want to know
- samsolomon 10y agoI think this is why I love Twitter, but also the reason many people don't. Unlike Facebook, where I feel beholden to follow the people I know, Twitter is different. I can follow the thoughts of people I've never met, but greatly respect. There are tons of great designers, writers and journalists that make my Twitter feed entertaining and informative. Not everyone is interested in design or media and it can be difficult to discover accounts. The other (previous) issue for Twitter is the feed. If you follow 1,000 people it will can be overwhelming. I was hesitant about the "You might have missed" section, but think it is a step in the right direction.
- iainmerrick 10y agoI absolutely agree with your sentiment, but how could they have become the "defacto messaging backbone" and made money at the same time? What should their business plan have been? It reminds me of Sun and Java. Sun built a really useful product, used by hundreds of thousands of developers, but it didn't make enough money to sustain the company. They tried opening it up and that just hurt them commercially.
- crabasa 10y agoI won't pretend to know how they should have monetized, that's what @jack is compensated richly to figure out. My point is that the chance to be the messaging backbone of the Internet was more valuable and a better use of Twitter's resources (human and financial capital) than the certainty of being defeated by Facebook.
- oldmanjay 10y agoIf it's not your job to figure out the how, why should anyone care about your opinion of the what? Edit: which is my slightly harsh way of saying dreams are easy, but doing is what counts.
- crabasa 10y agoSeparating the what from the how is the definition of delegation. Happens billions of times every day all over the world, to mostly good effect.
- cdubzzz 10y agoPerhaps an App Store style system for all that third party development?
- ars 10y ago> and made money at the same time The ecosystem would be a loss leader, simply for the purpose of having lots of market share. They would make money on their main product. Same as how google runs all sorts of services without making money on them, simply for the purpose of expanding online usage. It's basically a variant of the Freemium model.
- maverick_iceman 10y agoI'm curious, how allowing 3rd party development would have made Twitter the messaging backbone of the internet? What exactly do you mean by 'messaging backbone'?