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Twitter gained almost all of their value from third party clients and once they had that value, they told those developers to go jump in a lake. Don't help comp

Twitter gained almost all of their value from third party clients and once they had that value, they told those developers to go jump in a lake. Don't help companies for free, they will never repay you.

cbozeman 5y ago
I don't know enough to know if that's true, but I do believe you, and: > Don't help companies for free, they will never repay you. Is apparently not true, because Rockstar paid that guy for speeding up GTA Online's loading time... but a sample size of 1 is pretty bad data, I'll freely admit.
- nielsbot 5y ago
  "probably almost never" :)
- bigth 5y ago
  I say it is true. There used to be a lot of very popular twitter desktop apps that were used by the early adopters who brought lot of traffic to the platform.
- filmgirlcw 5y ago
  It is completely true. The term tweet, the @ sign, the hashtag, the bird imagery, the concept of the retweet and the quote tweet. Hell, the original Twitter for iOS client was Tweetie (which Twitter acquired), which introduced features like pull-to-refresh (a parent that now belongs to Twitter but is licensed freely to others). And Twitter did obliterate its relationships with its dev community. Totally killed it. The motives were sort of understandable in the abstract, Twitter wanted to control its experience and the sheer number of third party clients really went against that. Hell, the whole reason they bought Tweetdeck was defensive, because another company wanted to buy it and Tweetdeck had such huge usage in the brand management/large account Twitter space. The problem was by going scorched earth, Twitter gave the middle finger to not just developers like Iconfactory and others that created core features, but it really had the add-on effect of abruptly killing all the innovation that happened on top of their platform. The good news is that over the years, Twitter as a company has changed. The new API isn’t going to be a return to the pre-2013 days, but it does give developers a lot more options and freedom than before. Twitter smartly is still charging for API calls past a certain number and for broader access to the firehose — and it should, to be honest — and that means the days of being able to make good money off of a Twitter client are over for good (even Iconfactory and Tweetbot had to go subscription, which I think is fair for what are now very niche apps), but the new API is huge improvement and I do think the current team is really working to build good relationships with devs going forward, even if they can’t rectify the past.
  - nceqs3 5y ago
    *patent not parent
    - filmgirlcw 5y ago
      I’ll blame the the fact that I typed that in a moving car (I wasn’t the driver) and autocorrect is a bitch.
donohoe 5y ago
Sure, but in this case it was a Twitter developer, Blaine Cook, that suggested the word "tweet"
dmos62 5y ago
I'm a fan of taking a dip in a lake, though if they paid me for it, that would be even better.

cbozeman 5y ago

I don't know enough to know if that's true, but I do believe you, and: > Don't help companies for free, they will never repay you. Is apparently not true, because Rockstar paid that guy for speeding up GTA Online's loading time... but a sample size of 1 is pretty bad data, I'll freely admit.

nielsbot 5y ago
"probably almost never" :)
bigth 5y ago
I say it is true. There used to be a lot of very popular twitter desktop apps that were used by the early adopters who brought lot of traffic to the platform.
filmgirlcw 5y ago
It is completely true. The term tweet, the @ sign, the hashtag, the bird imagery, the concept of the retweet and the quote tweet. Hell, the original Twitter for iOS client was Tweetie (which Twitter acquired), which introduced features like pull-to-refresh (a parent that now belongs to Twitter but is licensed freely to others). And Twitter did obliterate its relationships with its dev community. Totally killed it. The motives were sort of understandable in the abstract, Twitter wanted to control its experience and the sheer number of third party clients really went against that. Hell, the whole reason they bought Tweetdeck was defensive, because another company wanted to buy it and Tweetdeck had such huge usage in the brand management/large account Twitter space. The problem was by going scorched earth, Twitter gave the middle finger to not just developers like Iconfactory and others that created core features, but it really had the add-on effect of abruptly killing all the innovation that happened on top of their platform. The good news is that over the years, Twitter as a company has changed. The new API isn’t going to be a return to the pre-2013 days, but it does give developers a lot more options and freedom than before. Twitter smartly is still charging for API calls past a certain number and for broader access to the firehose — and it should, to be honest — and that means the days of being able to make good money off of a Twitter client are over for good (even Iconfactory and Tweetbot had to go subscription, which I think is fair for what are now very niche apps), but the new API is huge improvement and I do think the current team is really working to build good relationships with devs going forward, even if they can’t rectify the past.
- nceqs3 5y ago
  *patent not parent
  - filmgirlcw 5y ago
    I’ll blame the the fact that I typed that in a moving car (I wasn’t the driver) and autocorrect is a bitch.

donohoe 5y ago

Sure, but in this case it was a Twitter developer, Blaine Cook, that suggested the word "tweet"

dmos62 5y ago

I'm a fan of taking a dip in a lake, though if they paid me for it, that would be even better.