12 ms·

Premium Account Activity API

77 points by fniephaus 8y ago

BillinghamJ 8y ago
That is absolute insanity...
- bkovacev 8y ago
  At the very minimum.
jitl 8y ago
So, this is what they’re going to ask Tweetbot and the rest of the alternative Twitter clients to switch to?
- fniephaus 8y ago
  Here's Sean Heber's response to this: https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996794900208287744 https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996794900208287744
- kylehotchkiss 8y ago
  It seems like they're waiting for enterprise pricing: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/15/tweetbot-3-arrives-with-a-new-look-and-a-reprieve-from-twitters-api-changes/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/15/tweetbot-3-arrives-with-a-... I'd pay $10/month for Tweetbot. It is an ad-free twitter experience after all.
  - guptaneil 8y ago
    Well Tweetbot will be paying Twitter $11/mo. For them to also make some money, they have to charge you closer to $20/mo.
    - jonknee 8y ago
      Tweetbot will not pay that, they'll poll instead of stream and have a worse product because of it.
      - kylehotchkiss 8y ago
        Tweetbot with poll still beats Twitter.com with streaming.
- Savageman 8y ago
  I think polling instead of real-time. The timeline has decent rate limits, but I can't understand if the Direct message is rate-limited globally for the app or not?
STRiDEX 8y ago
I think the context on this is http://apps-of-a-feather.com/ http://apps-of-a-feather.com/ on the recent changes to their api for app developers.
dkersten 8y ago
I think its important to qualify “users” in this case. Technically, its 250 subscriptions, whether or not theres a one to one mapping between subscription and user depends on the use case, although for a an app where each user requires their own unique stream, this is likely the case.
caiob 8y ago
I’m just going to sit and wait until Twitter falls into the irrelevancy black hole.
- isaiahg 8y ago
  They very nearly did until Trump came into power. Remember all the articles talking about the troubles twitter was having and everyone predicting the end. And then the campaign happened. Now everyone has twitter just to see what he'll say next.
mrguyorama 8y ago
I have no baseline to go by, but my gut feel is that the price is quite high. If it isn't, that means my data is worth $12 a month. Think of how many services are scraping/selling/aggregating/whatever-ing your data. Each one aught to be paying you the equivalent of $12 a month, either in straight cash for something you pay for, or in services. I know I'm not getting my value.
kylehotchkiss 8y ago
Seems to be how Twitter is accommodating for twitter clients not showing ads. That's like $11 a month for the 250 users but I imagine that the enterprise could get as low as $5/user/month. It's almost like the ad-free experience people want on social networks would be possible with this. I'm hoping they work with Tweetbot and this isn't a passive aggressive way to shut it down.
ProfessorLayton 8y ago
It looks like this is going to hit clients like Twitterific/Tweetbot pretty hard https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996784838349910016 https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996784838349910016 It's sad to see how Twitter is treating 3rd party devs, and "engaged" users — the kind of users willing to buy a 3rd party app to use their services. Furthermore, these engaged users bring their value to the platform by bringing in eyeballs from less engaged audiences rather than clicking on ads themselves.
- Boulth 8y ago
  For Twitter third party clients are basically competition so it's not surprising that they make API access as limited as possible. Furthermore because of network effects they are not afraid that a significant number of people will leave the platform.
  - ymolodtsov 8y ago
    Well, they could try to compete and make decent apps first.
  - sp332 8y ago
    As long as they're showing the ad-tweets, they're not competition.
  - solarkraft 8y ago
    For some reason they're treating them like competition. Hopefully they'll actually become competition and push users (the engaged ones who fed twitter to its current state and are dissatisfied now) to use Mastodon.
Someone1234 8y ago
This might not be an area people want to discuss, but at this price does it make a grey market API competitor viable? Meaning first party API access is seen as preferable because HTML scraping is unreliable and therefore necessitates a full time staff of individuals to respond to site changes. But if the price is high enough, couldn't a third party operating out of another part of the world undercut them using scraping, a dedicated team, and a clean API? Twitter may have technical remedies but it is unlikely they'd have legal ones outside of the US and a few Western countries. Official APIs Vs. "pirate" APIs haven't really been a major issue until now because companies simply weren't charging enough to make the alternative cost effective. Is that going to change with pricing strategies like this one?
- WaxProlix 8y ago
  These sorts of 'grey market' APIs already have a lot of infrastructure support too. Paid APIs haven't been the push, but people have wanted programmatic access to other peoples' site data for a while now. The real driver has just been "no API", not "pricey API".
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    Is there an industry term for non-official APIs? I often find myself wondering if a third-party service already exists around some aspect of a platform's "crown jewels", but don't really know how to search for them.
    - WaxProlix 8y ago
      Not that I know of, I just know that there's an ecosystem of bespoke site wrappers that people will pay for, and some folks who are quite good at it. Kind of grey hat stuff and it's been a few years since I was in contact with the scene, if you could call it that.
      - StudentStuff 8y ago
        Downloading a webpage and returning a snippet of it via API isn't greyhat work, just like building a search engine isn't greyhat work. Processing public websites is white hat work, and very common too! If a business wants to restrict access, they can take down their website.
mattbillenstein 8y ago
This I think is their enterprise data service as powered by a company they acquired awhile back -- I mean, for me if I were running a business an enterprise customer is at least this amount of money per month or otherwise why bother with them at all. Not sure what the big deal is.
biznickman 8y ago
Years ago they raised the minimum API entry pricing. I used to pay for Topsy and they gave aggregate data that was quite insightful and reasonably priced. Soon after Apple's acquisition they (1) jacked up the price, and then (2) shut it down soon after. The reality is that Twitter doesn't have the resources allocated to manage tiny customers and doesn't desire to. That decision was made years ago. They can give an employee 10 customers to manage each of whom spend $36,000 a year and likely will increase and the math adds up. Is anybody really shocked by this pricing?
- manigandham 8y ago
  Yes, because the platform is a worldwide social network, not a B2B app. Also what is there to manage? There's no need for the vast majority of app developers to talk to anyone to use an API.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    OP has a legacy mindset, essentially the only time I talk to a company about their API is when it returns bad data, or is non-functional. Outside of that, I might interact with an account manager at onboarding (due to some companies forcing you to deal with one), and if the API is heavily used, I may reach out and ask 'em if they can go cheaper, while shopping around with other companies offering APIs for said purpose.
kevin_b_er 8y ago
All I need to know is which 3rd party provider will give me a linear timeline, even if I have to pay a little. Twitter refuses to stop "curating" my feed on their website, so clearly I need to rely on a 3rd party. Facebook has long since become utterly useless due to feed curation.
- k3d 8y ago
  The thing is "a little" might be on the order of 10 bucks a month.
- ymolodtsov 8y ago
  The founders of thirt party apps already think it won’t be financially viable for them and their users.
dusing 8y ago
Anything for monitoring tweets with hashtags?
ranman 8y ago
More details here: https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/enabling-all-developers-to-build-on-the-account-activity-api.html https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/e... >”Site Streams, User Streams, and legacy Direct Message endpoints, originally slated for retirement on June 19th 2018, will be deprecated on Wednesday August 16, 2018 which provides 3 months from today’s release of the Account Activity API for migration.” This is a huge “fuck you developers” from Twitter. They should have offered a year from the GA date to port applications. They should be sending emails to all applications using streaming APIs. I like the webhook model, I think it’s great. I think the beta they had was effectively useless - for instance, the Docs were (still are?) entirely incorrect and basically told you completely wrong information with copy/paste errors everywhere. 0 QA. https://twittercommunity.com/t/account-activity-api-all-activities-beta-whitelist-failure/99652/12 https://twittercommunity.com/t/account-activity-api-all-acti... you couldn’t register more than one webhook and were locked into a “env-beta” URL. Again, the Docs were wrong here. I haven’t had a chance to review this since GA but I will now. I’m not hopeful that it’s any better given the track record of Twitter to deliver. If they did knock it out of the park I’ll be the first to praise them... but 3 months is still not enough time.
- ihuman 8y ago
  They announced the deprecation date back in December. https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/announcing-more-functionality-to-improve-customer-engagements-on-twitter.html https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/a...
  - Savageman 8y ago
    Yet they didn't give access to replacements until today.
- aiCeivi9 8y ago
  > This is a huge “fuck you developers” from Twitter. Well, they are doing it again. If developers didn't learn anything from the previous time why should we care?
ArmandGrillet 8y ago
What should we do? Twitter offered a base service that was great and they are now constantly removing features (no chronological timeline, no access to polls for 3rd party apps, now no streaming for 3rd party apps). A few days ago on HN we were talking about Mastodon but I don't see it replacing a Twitter as it's a platform, not a single entity that I can use. The best scenario I can imagine would be to see the teams behind Twitterific and Tweetbot creating a Mastodon server and offering me to switch in the app in the coming months. Twitter is screwing us because we are, as users of those apps, the 1%. And I'm quite sure that the people I follow are also part of the same single percent. To The Iconfactory and Tapbots: make me pay again, ask me to pay a subscription, I don't care. But screw Twitter, they treat you (and thus us) like garbage, make me switch to something offering me a better experience and that is guaranteed to last. Is posting tweets from my account through your apps still free? Then offer me the possibility to send tweets when I send messages on your new platform + a weekly message to send to my few followers that they should also switch. Twitter is gonna apparently kill you at some point anyway, letting your users see a stream ordered by a shitty IA and with 1/3 of ads. So please, let's fight instead of slowly dying.
- sp332 8y ago
  There's still an option for a chronological timeline. https://twitter.com/settings/account#personalize_timeline https://twitter.com/settings/account#personalize_timeline and uncheck "Show best tweets first". It will still inject a block called "In case you missed it" from time to time but you can dismiss it. Mastodon... it's a platform, not a single entity that I can use. That might be the tradeoff that has to be made. Pick a Mastodon instance whose administration you trust not to screw you over. If they do you can move to another. If you go with a single entity, you're going to be stuck when they mess with you. Like with Twitter.
  - eli 8y ago
    That only seems plausible if most of the people I want follow are already there.
    - 8y ago
nevi-me 8y ago
I have a Twitter account that retweets a specific # from followers (who submit crowdsourced train updates). Would these count as 1 subscription, or how does the subscription counting work? On the same account, I have some very basic chatbot thingy where you can ask "where is train 1234?" and get a response. It works by listening to the User Stream, and using regex to check if the "bot" is being asked a question. > When we announced our plans to retire and replace Site Streams, User Streams, and our REST Direct Message endpoints, we did so as part of our efforts to improve the developer experience and provide a sustainable way to help businesses engage with those looking to connect with them. Streams were pretty suitable for my use-case, so I don't believe Twitter on this sentence. Their changes seem like they just want a way to get non-firehose users to pay for accessing data streams, and might alienate some developers. Someone else mentioned the short timeline over which to migrate (for devs that only get access from today). Dear Twitter, you've had a bad run with alienating developers in the past; please decide what you want to do. If we build our communities around your platform, be more clear about what we have to now pay for.

77 points by fniephaus 8y ago

BillinghamJ 8y ago

That is absolute insanity...

bkovacev 8y ago
At the very minimum.

jitl 8y ago

So, this is what they’re going to ask Tweetbot and the rest of the alternative Twitter clients to switch to?

fniephaus 8y ago
Here's Sean Heber's response to this: https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996794900208287744 https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996794900208287744
kylehotchkiss 8y ago
It seems like they're waiting for enterprise pricing: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/15/tweetbot-3-arrives-with-a-new-look-and-a-reprieve-from-twitters-api-changes/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/15/tweetbot-3-arrives-with-a-... I'd pay $10/month for Tweetbot. It is an ad-free twitter experience after all.
- guptaneil 8y ago
  Well Tweetbot will be paying Twitter $11/mo. For them to also make some money, they have to charge you closer to $20/mo.
  - jonknee 8y ago
    Tweetbot will not pay that, they'll poll instead of stream and have a worse product because of it.
    - kylehotchkiss 8y ago
      Tweetbot with poll still beats Twitter.com with streaming.
Savageman 8y ago
I think polling instead of real-time. The timeline has decent rate limits, but I can't understand if the Direct message is rate-limited globally for the app or not?

STRiDEX 8y ago

I think the context on this is http://apps-of-a-feather.com/ http://apps-of-a-feather.com/ on the recent changes to their api for app developers.

dkersten 8y ago

I think its important to qualify “users” in this case. Technically, its 250 subscriptions, whether or not theres a one to one mapping between subscription and user depends on the use case, although for a an app where each user requires their own unique stream, this is likely the case.

caiob 8y ago

I’m just going to sit and wait until Twitter falls into the irrelevancy black hole.

isaiahg 8y ago
They very nearly did until Trump came into power. Remember all the articles talking about the troubles twitter was having and everyone predicting the end. And then the campaign happened. Now everyone has twitter just to see what he'll say next.

mrguyorama 8y ago

I have no baseline to go by, but my gut feel is that the price is quite high. If it isn't, that means my data is worth $12 a month. Think of how many services are scraping/selling/aggregating/whatever-ing your data. Each one aught to be paying you the equivalent of $12 a month, either in straight cash for something you pay for, or in services. I know I'm not getting my value.

kylehotchkiss 8y ago

Seems to be how Twitter is accommodating for twitter clients not showing ads. That's like $11 a month for the 250 users but I imagine that the enterprise could get as low as $5/user/month. It's almost like the ad-free experience people want on social networks would be possible with this. I'm hoping they work with Tweetbot and this isn't a passive aggressive way to shut it down.

ProfessorLayton 8y ago

It looks like this is going to hit clients like Twitterific/Tweetbot pretty hard https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996784838349910016 https://twitter.com/BigZaphod/status/996784838349910016 It's sad to see how Twitter is treating 3rd party devs, and "engaged" users — the kind of users willing to buy a 3rd party app to use their services. Furthermore, these engaged users bring their value to the platform by bringing in eyeballs from less engaged audiences rather than clicking on ads themselves.

Boulth 8y ago
For Twitter third party clients are basically competition so it's not surprising that they make API access as limited as possible. Furthermore because of network effects they are not afraid that a significant number of people will leave the platform.
- ymolodtsov 8y ago
  Well, they could try to compete and make decent apps first.
- sp332 8y ago
  As long as they're showing the ad-tweets, they're not competition.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  For some reason they're treating them like competition. Hopefully they'll actually become competition and push users (the engaged ones who fed twitter to its current state and are dissatisfied now) to use Mastodon.

Someone1234 8y ago

This might not be an area people want to discuss, but at this price does it make a grey market API competitor viable? Meaning first party API access is seen as preferable because HTML scraping is unreliable and therefore necessitates a full time staff of individuals to respond to site changes. But if the price is high enough, couldn't a third party operating out of another part of the world undercut them using scraping, a dedicated team, and a clean API? Twitter may have technical remedies but it is unlikely they'd have legal ones outside of the US and a few Western countries. Official APIs Vs. "pirate" APIs haven't really been a major issue until now because companies simply weren't charging enough to make the alternative cost effective. Is that going to change with pricing strategies like this one?

WaxProlix 8y ago
These sorts of 'grey market' APIs already have a lot of infrastructure support too. Paid APIs haven't been the push, but people have wanted programmatic access to other peoples' site data for a while now. The real driver has just been "no API", not "pricey API".
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  Is there an industry term for non-official APIs? I often find myself wondering if a third-party service already exists around some aspect of a platform's "crown jewels", but don't really know how to search for them.
  - WaxProlix 8y ago
    Not that I know of, I just know that there's an ecosystem of bespoke site wrappers that people will pay for, and some folks who are quite good at it. Kind of grey hat stuff and it's been a few years since I was in contact with the scene, if you could call it that.
    - StudentStuff 8y ago
      Downloading a webpage and returning a snippet of it via API isn't greyhat work, just like building a search engine isn't greyhat work. Processing public websites is white hat work, and very common too! If a business wants to restrict access, they can take down their website.

mattbillenstein 8y ago

This I think is their enterprise data service as powered by a company they acquired awhile back -- I mean, for me if I were running a business an enterprise customer is at least this amount of money per month or otherwise why bother with them at all. Not sure what the big deal is.

biznickman 8y ago

Years ago they raised the minimum API entry pricing. I used to pay for Topsy and they gave aggregate data that was quite insightful and reasonably priced. Soon after Apple's acquisition they (1) jacked up the price, and then (2) shut it down soon after. The reality is that Twitter doesn't have the resources allocated to manage tiny customers and doesn't desire to. That decision was made years ago. They can give an employee 10 customers to manage each of whom spend $36,000 a year and likely will increase and the math adds up. Is anybody really shocked by this pricing?

manigandham 8y ago
Yes, because the platform is a worldwide social network, not a B2B app. Also what is there to manage? There's no need for the vast majority of app developers to talk to anyone to use an API.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  OP has a legacy mindset, essentially the only time I talk to a company about their API is when it returns bad data, or is non-functional. Outside of that, I might interact with an account manager at onboarding (due to some companies forcing you to deal with one), and if the API is heavily used, I may reach out and ask 'em if they can go cheaper, while shopping around with other companies offering APIs for said purpose.

kevin_b_er 8y ago

All I need to know is which 3rd party provider will give me a linear timeline, even if I have to pay a little. Twitter refuses to stop "curating" my feed on their website, so clearly I need to rely on a 3rd party. Facebook has long since become utterly useless due to feed curation.

k3d 8y ago
The thing is "a little" might be on the order of 10 bucks a month.
ymolodtsov 8y ago
The founders of thirt party apps already think it won’t be financially viable for them and their users.

dusing 8y ago

Anything for monitoring tweets with hashtags?

ranman 8y ago

More details here: https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/enabling-all-developers-to-build-on-the-account-activity-api.html https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/e... >”Site Streams, User Streams, and legacy Direct Message endpoints, originally slated for retirement on June 19th 2018, will be deprecated on Wednesday August 16, 2018 which provides 3 months from today’s release of the Account Activity API for migration.” This is a huge “fuck you developers” from Twitter. They should have offered a year from the GA date to port applications. They should be sending emails to all applications using streaming APIs. I like the webhook model, I think it’s great. I think the beta they had was effectively useless - for instance, the Docs were (still are?) entirely incorrect and basically told you completely wrong information with copy/paste errors everywhere. 0 QA. https://twittercommunity.com/t/account-activity-api-all-activities-beta-whitelist-failure/99652/12 https://twittercommunity.com/t/account-activity-api-all-acti... you couldn’t register more than one webhook and were locked into a “env-beta” URL. Again, the Docs were wrong here. I haven’t had a chance to review this since GA but I will now. I’m not hopeful that it’s any better given the track record of Twitter to deliver. If they did knock it out of the park I’ll be the first to praise them... but 3 months is still not enough time.

ihuman 8y ago
They announced the deprecation date back in December. https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/announcing-more-functionality-to-improve-customer-engagements-on-twitter.html https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2017/a...
- Savageman 8y ago
  Yet they didn't give access to replacements until today.
aiCeivi9 8y ago
> This is a huge “fuck you developers” from Twitter. Well, they are doing it again. If developers didn't learn anything from the previous time why should we care?

ArmandGrillet 8y ago

What should we do? Twitter offered a base service that was great and they are now constantly removing features (no chronological timeline, no access to polls for 3rd party apps, now no streaming for 3rd party apps). A few days ago on HN we were talking about Mastodon but I don't see it replacing a Twitter as it's a platform, not a single entity that I can use. The best scenario I can imagine would be to see the teams behind Twitterific and Tweetbot creating a Mastodon server and offering me to switch in the app in the coming months. Twitter is screwing us because we are, as users of those apps, the 1%. And I'm quite sure that the people I follow are also part of the same single percent. To The Iconfactory and Tapbots: make me pay again, ask me to pay a subscription, I don't care. But screw Twitter, they treat you (and thus us) like garbage, make me switch to something offering me a better experience and that is guaranteed to last. Is posting tweets from my account through your apps still free? Then offer me the possibility to send tweets when I send messages on your new platform + a weekly message to send to my few followers that they should also switch. Twitter is gonna apparently kill you at some point anyway, letting your users see a stream ordered by a shitty IA and with 1/3 of ads. So please, let's fight instead of slowly dying.

sp332 8y ago
There's still an option for a chronological timeline. https://twitter.com/settings/account#personalize_timeline https://twitter.com/settings/account#personalize_timeline and uncheck "Show best tweets first". It will still inject a block called "In case you missed it" from time to time but you can dismiss it. Mastodon... it's a platform, not a single entity that I can use. That might be the tradeoff that has to be made. Pick a Mastodon instance whose administration you trust not to screw you over. If they do you can move to another. If you go with a single entity, you're going to be stuck when they mess with you. Like with Twitter.
- eli 8y ago
  That only seems plausible if most of the people I want follow are already there.
  - 8y ago

nevi-me 8y ago

I have a Twitter account that retweets a specific # from followers (who submit crowdsourced train updates). Would these count as 1 subscription, or how does the subscription counting work? On the same account, I have some very basic chatbot thingy where you can ask "where is train 1234?" and get a response. It works by listening to the User Stream, and using regex to check if the "bot" is being asked a question. > When we announced our plans to retire and replace Site Streams, User Streams, and our REST Direct Message endpoints, we did so as part of our efforts to improve the developer experience and provide a sustainable way to help businesses engage with those looking to connect with them. Streams were pretty suitable for my use-case, so I don't believe Twitter on this sentence. Their changes seem like they just want a way to get non-firehose users to pay for accessing data streams, and might alienate some developers. Someone else mentioned the short timeline over which to migrate (for devs that only get access from today). Dear Twitter, you've had a bad run with alienating developers in the past; please decide what you want to do. If we build our communities around your platform, be more clear about what we have to now pay for.