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One day entire books will be written about how Twitter, a company with lots of time, money, millions of users and hundreds of the smartest people in tech were s

• tw04 10y ago
  The beginning of the end was when they started shutting down APIs to lock out third party integration.
  • fnbr 10y ago
    Yup. It kind of made sense in the short run (kill competitors, steal & re-implement their ideas), but in the long run, condemned Twitter to only be a short message platform (albeit a very very good short message platform). Interestingly, Facebook did the same (remember how bad Farmville was at first), but at a much later date, and they seem to have weathered the change fine.
    • k__ 10y ago
      I always read about this API shutdown. How come that Buffer and Crowdfire still operate?
      • Shank 10y ago
        They started limiting third party clients. Places like Buffer and Crowdfire aren't third party clients, i.e., they don't re-create the timeline view.
• firasd 10y ago
  There seems to have been an inflection point in 2014 at which they stopped shipping product updates.
  • mtgx 10y ago
    It kind of all went downhill since when Twitter essentially banned third-party developers from the platform (or at least all Twitter client makers). Third-party Twitter client-makers could've offered users an experience Twitter itself seems unable to offer - such as much better anti-abuse systems, better spam protection, better identification of bots, and so on. But no, Twitter had to ban them so it can "control the experience" (as in offer you whatever type of ads they wanted and not have to deal with client makers when pushing them to users).
  • fnbr 10y ago
    I suspect that was when they began to concentrate their efforts on ads & the associated tooling.