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Twitter sets max user caps for 3rd party clients and limits rates

250 points by rkudeshi 14y ago

fufulabs 14y ago
This removes their duality of being a media / service play. This is highly beneficial to Twitter itself as well as to a new service/platform aiming to be a pure microblogging piping service. The only loser here are the Twitter app developers and startups which are faced with a now limited channel to promote their apps.
- dannygarcia 14y ago
  I don't see how this benefits Twitter. A large amount of users rely solely on a dedicated third party client. If those apps lose the ability to provide the same reliable service, then Twitter (as a platform) will also be affected.
  - danilocampos 14y ago
    "Only" 23% of users. Still, I could see the argument that some users are better than others and the most engaged ones are more likely to get a third party client. Which means either Twitter loses those users eventually or coerces them into using their first-party offerings.
  - fufulabs 14y ago
    It will coerce/force a % of users to use the 1st party apps. It will also allow them to focus on media platform features without the distraction of pleasing 3rd party devs (at the moment). I am pretty sure they will improve that side AFTER they have finished being a destination platform.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    Existing clients are grandfathered in, as far as I can tell from Twitter's blog post.
ljd 14y ago
"It is also limiting the rate on its API per end-point, meaning that most individual clients will be limited to 60 calls per hour instead of 350 calls per hour. " If you can't raise revenue, reduce expenses. That cut is significant enough to reduce their rate of growth of monthly expenses but probably not enough to reduce their rate of user growth. Probably not a bad move for them. With press releases like this Twitter is App.net's new best friend.
- gjulianm 14y ago
  <i>Most individual API endpoints will be rate limited at 60 calls per hour per-endpoint. Based on analysis of current use of our API, this rate limit will be well above the needs of most applications built against the Twitter API, while protecting our systems from abusive applications. There will be a set of high-volume endpoints related to Tweet display, profile display, user lookup and user search where applications will be able to make up to 720 calls per hour per endpoint.</i> 60 calls per hour are only for certain endpoints, probably creating lists, tweeting... It's really rare that an user uses so much of this kind of resources. The endpoints that are used the more (viewing tweets, look up an user, etc) are actually less limited than before.
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    Maybe they just hate the crazed Bieber, Glee, and Twilight fans out there with over 20k tweets to their name like the rest of us. :) It could suck for live-tweeting events, though.
Tichy 14y ago
Well I am out of there first chance I see...
- jcoder 14y ago
  What's stopping you now?
  - Tichy 14y ago
    Where should I go to? Status.net somehow didn't deliver, although I guess I could reevaluate. I think what was missing back then was mirroring Twitter - my tweets were sent to Twitter, but I didn't get the Tweets from the people I followed on Twitter.
jmathai 14y ago
I anticipate a flurry of parodies on their use of the term "flock" except away from Twitter and not towards.
WALoeIII 14y ago
There could be a revenue stream in here. They're limiting how many free users an application may have, but I would expect they could charge Tweetbot to have more users. Tweetbot could simply build this cost into the software.
fudged71 14y ago
I finally got really into Twitter this year. Sad to see them being so restrictive with their platform. Maybe App.Net isn't such a bad idea after all. It's amazing how poor the first party clients for Facebook and Twitter are compared to the functionality and rate of development on 3rd party apps. Maybe paying to be a part of a less restrictive network will be worth it in the end. I just hope they can get a big following with a bunch of apps integrated with it.
jonknee 14y ago
I have seen a lot more pushes trying to get me to advertise lately (tons of sponsored tweets). I wonder if this is related to their revenue push--knock out their competitors and lower API costs.
danilocampos 14y ago
Basic truth: New technology is driven by early adopters, who then influence their less tech-savvy pals. Happened with Google, happened with the iPhone, and it happened with Twitter. So now that the obvious is out of the way – we'll look back one day and see this as the day Twitter fucked the dog. They've made a decision that motivates the very core of early adopters who embraced Twitter to move on. Yeah, they have to make money. They've convinced themselves the experience must be entirely under their control to do it. Okay. And maybe that's so. And maybe they'll squeeze some pennies out for awhile. In the meantime, there's a group of folks who first jumped into Twitter during the days where you weren't chained to their mediocre user products. They'll start the move to a better network. And one day, everyone will look around and see all that's left on Twitter is the glitter gif morons and big brands with more money than sense, just as happened with MySpace.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  > They've made a decision that motivates the very core of early adopters who embraced Twitter to move on. What decision specifically are you talking about?
  - danilocampos 14y ago
    Limiting the growth and development of third party applications.
- pkulak 14y ago
  MySpace didn't die because they pissed off the early adopter geeks. They pissed off everyone. And everyone left. If Twitter just becomes the place where hundreds of millions of people follow hundreds of celebrities while also looking at ads, I think they're okay with that.
  - citricsquid 14y ago
    I don't think Myspace pissed anyone off, it was more that their product didn't make any sense. In my experience people didn't leave Myspace for Facebook because they "hated Myspace", they left because Facebook was a better product that met their needs. I don't think Twitter should be concerned unless someone builds a better product.
aaronbrethorst 14y ago
Wow, fuck you very much, Twitter. I really wish this had happened when App.net was still raising their $500k. Even though I still don't think App.net will work out, I would've still chipped in out of spite towards Twitter. This is ridiculous, and I'm going to figure out how to get out as soon as possible. edit: I put my money where my mouth is, as it were: Success! Thank you for joining App.net! You will receive an email confirmation to complete the signup process. Your plan is Developer Tier for $100 per year. You're in line to join the alpha with username: @aaronbrethorst.
- abraham 14y ago
  App.net got over $800k in funding and still has a large amount left from picplz. As Dalton put it at last nights AirBnB tech talk, they have an "infinite amount of time" for a startup. As in several years at their current burn rate.
  - illicium 14y ago
    1 week to write a Twitter clone, several years to blog about it.
    - jordanthoms 14y ago
      They can just use the rails tutorial, right? :-)
pavel_lishin 14y ago
Please read the original article. This very unfairly summarizes the actual blogpost. The limit isn't 60 hits per hour. It's 60 hits per hour per endpoint, and only for some endpoints. The user limit is 1 million users for certain api endpoints, and 100k for others - and if you need more than that, they would like you to reach out to them. Oh, and also, all current clients are grandfathered into the old terms. Please examine the bandwagon carefully before jumping on it.
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  From https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api: "If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you'll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you'll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission." Translation: 'Fuck you, 3rd party Twitter clients.' They'll still cut them off at the knees when they hit at most 200,000 users. Edit: I kept reading the blog post and it got better: That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, "traditional" Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience." And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today. In other words, 3rd party Twitter clients are dead. Not today, but next year they're dead as a doorknob. Edit 2: Thanks for the clarification on the '200%' thing. I think the net result is still about the same for Twitter clients in the end. They'll be EOL'd by their developers and increasingly ignored by users.
  - rlivsey 14y ago
    Translation: 'Fuck you, 3rd party Twitter clients.' They'll still cut them off at the knees when they hit at most 200,000 users. Nitpick - it's 200% of what they're at now, so if they currently have a million users they're good for up to 2 million.
mikecane 14y ago
With the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini coming up, I wonder if the projections of new users from those influenced this decision?
dave_sullivan 14y ago
I wonder if a p2p twitter would be possible. I guess there would be real storage/timeliness issues, but twitter always struck me as more rss replacement than anything else, and I'm not sure it makes sense to have something like that run by one company. I think twitter is a cool concept/application, but I'm not sure it will ever be a great business.
- abraham 14y ago
  A decentralized "Twitter" exists, is fully functional, and is open source. http://status.net/ http://status.net/
  - thinkingisfun 14y ago
    there's also rstat.us :) ( https://rstat.us/about https://rstat.us/about )
- runn1ng 14y ago
  I have a genius idea how to make a p2p pseudo-twitter which I have shared with only one person yet, but why not share it now on HN (maybe someone can build it instead of me, since I don't have the time at the moment because of school stuff). Basically, what you need to solve in something like p2p twitter is: how to authentificate the user, how to send the message around, how to archive the message that it is not lost. Now the genius idea: all of this is exactly what bitcoin solves. Bitcoin already has mechanisms for authenticating. Bitcoin already has mechanisms for sharing messages (altough it is called "transactions"). Bitcoin has a mechanism for archiving those messages (it's called "blockchain"). And the kicker - bitcoin already has an ability to enter arbitrary data into the transaction. (sure, not much, but about the 160 letters tweets have.) You just add it into the script and add OP_DROP; since the transaction including script is signed, noone can just remove it. My idea was to hijack the already existing bitcoin infrastructure and hack Twitter-like P2P messaging thing on top of it; let's call it "bitmessage". How would sending a "bitmessage" look like? Well, you can, for example, send money from your address to the same address (send money to yourself) and add the wanted string into the script. You can then look for a message of a given user (if you take bitcoin address as an ID of the user). Now of course, this wouldn't be free for long (if it catched up). Right now, bitcoin miners take just anything the P2P network throws at them, but if the network was flooded with people sending money to themselves with a message in script, they would just throw these away so it doesn't enlarge the already giant blockchain. However, you can add fees to any transaction. If you add fees high enough, some block miner will eventually take your "bitmessage" and add it to the blockchain. Would the resulting thing be equivalent of twitter? No, it would be slow (it takes about 10 minutes to get transaction to blockchain) and it would most likely not be for free (if it catches on, miners will throw away the messages with low fees). On the other hand, every message would be recorded forever, without any chance of anyone deleting it, censoring it or getting your IP address. Also, the Bitcoin seems to be going strong and doesn't seem like it will go away any time soon, and the infrastructure is super-strong. I want to hack a prototype... maybe... one day.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
rksprst 14y ago
In the tweet display guidelines: "No other social or 3rd party actions may be attached to a Tweet." https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-guidelines https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-guidelines Wonder if that means 3rd party apps can't add actions to tweets like "assign to a user", "translate", "schedule a reply", etc. That might just kill major functionality for apps like HootSuite, CoTweet, Radian6's Engagement Console. Or, since it's under the guidelines for individual tweets, are tweets in the timeline excluded from that limitation?
- whamill 14y ago
  Tweets in a timeline, on the Twitter feed in the web client, all have the retweet/quote/reply/favourite actions per-tweet so I would expect that they mean each and every tweet displayed anywhere.
ctide 14y ago
Congratulations Dalton Caldwell! Who could have known that Twitter would just hand you the entire game with one stupid maneuver.
- dm8 14y ago
  It makes things harder for developers. But it doesn't affect end-user at all. Twitter already has eye balls, celebrity users. Average joe doesn't care if Twitter has 100k user cap for third party client. End-user experience is getting better day by day. Ask someone who is not tech savvy is on Twitter.
  - jonursenbach 14y ago
    Users will care then their favorite application no longer works.
    - dm8 14y ago
      They will curse the application developer and choose the next best application. In this case, it will be Twitter.
zethraeus 14y ago
It's rather frightening that the only example that they give of a user facing service in the appropriate 'quadrant' is Klout.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  Good: Klout Bad: Tweetbot, Storify What is this, Opposite Day? That stopped being fun in kindergarten.
mehulkar 14y ago
Winter is coming.
- dm8 14y ago
  Which winter are you talking about? Twitter has been tightening the strings for a while now.
state 14y ago
It seems to me that the kinds of applications they are trying to prevent from existing are precisely the ones that they could learn the most from and could provide them with the most new users. I also don't see how this action actually wins them that many more eyes. Are there really that many third party Twitter apps out there?
chj 14y ago
If you are develop!ng for every s!ngle platform on th!s planet today, you are e!ther f!!ked or wa!t!ng to be f!!ked. Un!ted, developers!
galactus 14y ago
I guess twitter thinks it is big enough to stop worrying about pissing third party developers off. In the short term it probably won't hurt them much.
DigitalSea 14y ago
Can you smell that? It's the smell of victory, the smell of Dalton Caldwell lighting a Cuban cigar in celebration of Twitter driving basically every single 3rd party developer over to App.net.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
Remember the Great Twitter Strategy Document Leak of 2009? http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet-2/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-... What happened to those plans? They seemed so smart...
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  New management, new strategy.
DeanCollinsNYC 14y ago
Would the last Twitter developer out please turn off the lights when you leave. Lol this is the beginning of the end for twitter and third party developers. Ever since MyTwitterButler received its first cease and desist it has been a game of footsies with third party developers but with these new rules why would you bother.
jot 14y ago
How would you feel if Google announced that you could only access their services using Chrome? What does it take to activate the antitrust lawyers?
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  I'd feel pretty shitty if Microsoft said I could only access Windows Update using Internet Explorer.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  I wonder if "antitrust" and "monopoly" talk are HN forms of Godwin's Law. Before Twitter would be remotely concerned about antitrust, there would have to not be a place with more users that you can talk about your cat's lunch to your heart's content. Facebook has more to fear than Twitter does.
_lex 14y ago
Twitter is making it very unappealing to build on their platform, since developers have to effectively give up a large chunk of autonomy and trust that Twitter's business model won't change again, and that Twitter won't suddenly start competing with them. And anyone who's paying attention knows that that's exactly what Twitter will do, since they don't have a clear, believable business model, and they've done it(destroyed their 'developers') before.
guelo 14y ago
I use Twitter via their official apps, I have tried some of the third party apps but haven't really been impressed. After all this time it didn't seem like the app ecosystem was coming up with anything really innovative besides slightly different ways of organizing the feeds.
- dustyreagan 14y ago
  That's because they bought the cool third party apps like the TweetDeck and Tweetie, and have since begun shunning third party developers. In short, the official apps were third party apps, and now no one wants to make any additional Twitter apps because Twitter has become hostile to developers. They've closed the door on third party inovation for their platform.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    > like the TweetDeck and Tweetie Don't you mean Tweetbot or something? Tweetie was bought by Twitter, rebranded to be the official Twitter client, and in no small part gutted and left to rot (gutted for the mobile version, left to rot for the desktop one).
    - RKearney 14y ago
      >> That's because they bought the cool third party apps like the TweetDeck and Tweetie >Tweetie was bought by Twitter That's what they said. I think you misread that post.
- buro9 14y ago
  Try twicca on Android. It is substantially faster to use and performs really well (scrolling long lists) on older Android devices. In fact, the official clients are almost unusable on slower/older Android devices, whereas twicca is fast and responsive.
mhartl 14y ago
This is the kind of thing that happens when you don't have a business model.
ashbrahma 14y ago
Anyone know how to check the number of users that have authenticated the apps on the twitter dev portal?
- abraham 14y ago
  Currently you can't. They used to show those numbers but dropped it, I think, for scaling issues a long while ago. Maybe Twitter will bring it back.
moe 14y ago
R.I.P. Twitter *06/2006 †08/2012
px1999 14y ago
I'm having trouble trying to figure out who Twitter's trying to target with these changes - and can't figure out if: 1. They want to corner the advertiser & business market - ie it's an attack on Hootsuite etc 2. They want to lock out competitors from pwning them on search (Google/Bing incorporating [good] twitter results into their searches would IMO be devastating to twitter - particularly if they didn't embed intents / hueg links to twitter everywhere) 3. They want to own the ecosystem so that twitter clients don't cross-post to Facebook/G+/app.net/favourite social network here 4. (I don't think this is likely) - Twitter thinking that they can somehow squeeze an extra couple of bucks out of each user if they're on an official client via advertising or something similar. . Each of these seems plausible to me, but all of them essentially involve twitter holding customers/data/users hostage which doesn't seem like a great strategy. Is there some angle I'm missing here / reading too much into?
- jchung 14y ago
  I was also trying to figure out the business rationale for this move. Their 2x2 chart gets us relatively close to understanding their strategy. Here's what it looks like: - Twitter doesn't want to own analytics for business or consumer players. - Twitter doesn't want to own engagement for businesses. - Twitter DOES want to own engagement for consumers. This seems pretty counter-intuitive to me. Since businesses are the ones who actually pay twitter cash, I would have expected them to try to own the whole left side of their chart, and leave developers to create new innovations for the whole right side of the chart. What would you have to believe in order for this to be a good idea? Some possibilities: - Twitter thinks that developers will ruin the consumer experience, slowing their growth. - Twitter thinks that businesses won't pay them unless consumers are tweeting on twitter.com - Twitter doesn't think that analytics or business engagement services will be lucrative enough for them to invest directly in. - Twitter thinks that if the developer community spends its effort in the top-right, it will distract the community from innovating in the other three quadrants, where Twitter wants to see more development to unlock more business-driven revenues (This one is a real longshot, but I'm trying to be comprehensive) - Twitter doesn't care about users tweeting or consuming tweets if they aren't on twitter.com (I'm still struggling to figure out why this is bad for twitter -- any thoughts, HN?)
ukd1 14y ago
Hello App.net.
imrehg 14y ago
I really want to like Twitter, I really do. So many possibilities, so many interesting services built on top of them, it would be a great centre for "online identity", a main front to communicate with friends and audience. Except when they do these kinds of things, and I wonder how on Earth it makes any sense besides "because we can"?
bane 14y ago
So why are they doing this? My guess is to drive users to their clients, so that they can start displaying ads and gather revenue. 3rd party clients won't display Twitter's own ads so there's no way for the service to collect on that.

250 points by rkudeshi 14y ago

This removes their duality of being a media / service play. This is highly beneficial to Twitter itself as well as to a new service/platform aiming to be a pure microblogging piping service. The only loser here are the Twitter app developers and startups which are faced with a now limited channel to promote their apps.

dannygarcia 14y ago
I don't see how this benefits Twitter. A large amount of users rely solely on a dedicated third party client. If those apps lose the ability to provide the same reliable service, then Twitter (as a platform) will also be affected.
- danilocampos 14y ago
  "Only" 23% of users. Still, I could see the argument that some users are better than others and the most engaged ones are more likely to get a third party client. Which means either Twitter loses those users eventually or coerces them into using their first-party offerings.
- fufulabs 14y ago
  It will coerce/force a % of users to use the 1st party apps. It will also allow them to focus on media platform features without the distraction of pleasing 3rd party devs (at the moment). I am pretty sure they will improve that side AFTER they have finished being a destination platform.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  Existing clients are grandfathered in, as far as I can tell from Twitter's blog post.

ljd 14y ago

"It is also limiting the rate on its API per end-point, meaning that most individual clients will be limited to 60 calls per hour instead of 350 calls per hour. " If you can't raise revenue, reduce expenses. That cut is significant enough to reduce their rate of growth of monthly expenses but probably not enough to reduce their rate of user growth. Probably not a bad move for them. With press releases like this Twitter is App.net's new best friend.

gjulianm 14y ago
<i>Most individual API endpoints will be rate limited at 60 calls per hour per-endpoint. Based on analysis of current use of our API, this rate limit will be well above the needs of most applications built against the Twitter API, while protecting our systems from abusive applications. There will be a set of high-volume endpoints related to Tweet display, profile display, user lookup and user search where applications will be able to make up to 720 calls per hour per endpoint.</i> 60 calls per hour are only for certain endpoints, probably creating lists, tweeting... It's really rare that an user uses so much of this kind of resources. The endpoints that are used the more (viewing tweets, look up an user, etc) are actually less limited than before.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  Maybe they just hate the crazed Bieber, Glee, and Twilight fans out there with over 20k tweets to their name like the rest of us. :) It could suck for live-tweeting events, though.

Tichy 14y ago

Well I am out of there first chance I see...

jcoder 14y ago
What's stopping you now?
- Tichy 14y ago
  Where should I go to? Status.net somehow didn't deliver, although I guess I could reevaluate. I think what was missing back then was mirroring Twitter - my tweets were sent to Twitter, but I didn't get the Tweets from the people I followed on Twitter.

jmathai 14y ago

I anticipate a flurry of parodies on their use of the term "flock" except away from Twitter and not towards.

WALoeIII 14y ago

There could be a revenue stream in here. They're limiting how many free users an application may have, but I would expect they could charge Tweetbot to have more users. Tweetbot could simply build this cost into the software.

fudged71 14y ago

I finally got really into Twitter this year. Sad to see them being so restrictive with their platform. Maybe App.Net isn't such a bad idea after all. It's amazing how poor the first party clients for Facebook and Twitter are compared to the functionality and rate of development on 3rd party apps. Maybe paying to be a part of a less restrictive network will be worth it in the end. I just hope they can get a big following with a bunch of apps integrated with it.

jonknee 14y ago

I have seen a lot more pushes trying to get me to advertise lately (tons of sponsored tweets). I wonder if this is related to their revenue push--knock out their competitors and lower API costs.

danilocampos 14y ago

Basic truth: New technology is driven by early adopters, who then influence their less tech-savvy pals. Happened with Google, happened with the iPhone, and it happened with Twitter. So now that the obvious is out of the way – we'll look back one day and see this as the day Twitter fucked the dog. They've made a decision that motivates the very core of early adopters who embraced Twitter to move on. Yeah, they have to make money. They've convinced themselves the experience must be entirely under their control to do it. Okay. And maybe that's so. And maybe they'll squeeze some pennies out for awhile. In the meantime, there's a group of folks who first jumped into Twitter during the days where you weren't chained to their mediocre user products. They'll start the move to a better network. And one day, everyone will look around and see all that's left on Twitter is the glitter gif morons and big brands with more money than sense, just as happened with MySpace.

pavel_lishin 14y ago
> They've made a decision that motivates the very core of early adopters who embraced Twitter to move on. What decision specifically are you talking about?
- danilocampos 14y ago
  Limiting the growth and development of third party applications.
pkulak 14y ago
MySpace didn't die because they pissed off the early adopter geeks. They pissed off everyone. And everyone left. If Twitter just becomes the place where hundreds of millions of people follow hundreds of celebrities while also looking at ads, I think they're okay with that.
- citricsquid 14y ago
  I don't think Myspace pissed anyone off, it was more that their product didn't make any sense. In my experience people didn't leave Myspace for Facebook because they "hated Myspace", they left because Facebook was a better product that met their needs. I don't think Twitter should be concerned unless someone builds a better product.

aaronbrethorst 14y ago

Wow, fuck you very much, Twitter. I really wish this had happened when App.net was still raising their $500k. Even though I still don't think App.net will work out, I would've still chipped in out of spite towards Twitter. This is ridiculous, and I'm going to figure out how to get out as soon as possible. edit: I put my money where my mouth is, as it were: Success! Thank you for joining App.net! You will receive an email confirmation to complete the signup process. Your plan is Developer Tier for $100 per year. You're in line to join the alpha with username: @aaronbrethorst.

abraham 14y ago
App.net got over $800k in funding and still has a large amount left from picplz. As Dalton put it at last nights AirBnB tech talk, they have an "infinite amount of time" for a startup. As in several years at their current burn rate.
- illicium 14y ago
  1 week to write a Twitter clone, several years to blog about it.
  - jordanthoms 14y ago
    They can just use the rails tutorial, right? :-)

pavel_lishin 14y ago

Please read the original article. This very unfairly summarizes the actual blogpost. The limit isn't 60 hits per hour. It's 60 hits per hour per endpoint, and only for some endpoints. The user limit is 1 million users for certain api endpoints, and 100k for others - and if you need more than that, they would like you to reach out to them. Oh, and also, all current clients are grandfathered into the old terms. Please examine the bandwagon carefully before jumping on it.

aaronbrethorst 14y ago
From https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api: "If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you'll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you'll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission." Translation: 'Fuck you, 3rd party Twitter clients.' They'll still cut them off at the knees when they hit at most 200,000 users. Edit: I kept reading the blog post and it got better: That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, "traditional" Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience." And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today. In other words, 3rd party Twitter clients are dead. Not today, but next year they're dead as a doorknob. Edit 2: Thanks for the clarification on the '200%' thing. I think the net result is still about the same for Twitter clients in the end. They'll be EOL'd by their developers and increasingly ignored by users.
- rlivsey 14y ago
  Translation: 'Fuck you, 3rd party Twitter clients.' They'll still cut them off at the knees when they hit at most 200,000 users. Nitpick - it's 200% of what they're at now, so if they currently have a million users they're good for up to 2 million.

mikecane 14y ago

With the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini coming up, I wonder if the projections of new users from those influenced this decision?

dave_sullivan 14y ago

I wonder if a p2p twitter would be possible. I guess there would be real storage/timeliness issues, but twitter always struck me as more rss replacement than anything else, and I'm not sure it makes sense to have something like that run by one company. I think twitter is a cool concept/application, but I'm not sure it will ever be a great business.

abraham 14y ago
A decentralized "Twitter" exists, is fully functional, and is open source. http://status.net/ http://status.net/
- thinkingisfun 14y ago
  there's also rstat.us :) ( https://rstat.us/about https://rstat.us/about )
runn1ng 14y ago
I have a genius idea how to make a p2p pseudo-twitter which I have shared with only one person yet, but why not share it now on HN (maybe someone can build it instead of me, since I don't have the time at the moment because of school stuff). Basically, what you need to solve in something like p2p twitter is: how to authentificate the user, how to send the message around, how to archive the message that it is not lost. Now the genius idea: all of this is exactly what bitcoin solves. Bitcoin already has mechanisms for authenticating. Bitcoin already has mechanisms for sharing messages (altough it is called "transactions"). Bitcoin has a mechanism for archiving those messages (it's called "blockchain"). And the kicker - bitcoin already has an ability to enter arbitrary data into the transaction. (sure, not much, but about the 160 letters tweets have.) You just add it into the script and add OP_DROP; since the transaction including script is signed, noone can just remove it. My idea was to hijack the already existing bitcoin infrastructure and hack Twitter-like P2P messaging thing on top of it; let's call it "bitmessage". How would sending a "bitmessage" look like? Well, you can, for example, send money from your address to the same address (send money to yourself) and add the wanted string into the script. You can then look for a message of a given user (if you take bitcoin address as an ID of the user). Now of course, this wouldn't be free for long (if it catched up). Right now, bitcoin miners take just anything the P2P network throws at them, but if the network was flooded with people sending money to themselves with a message in script, they would just throw these away so it doesn't enlarge the already giant blockchain. However, you can add fees to any transaction. If you add fees high enough, some block miner will eventually take your "bitmessage" and add it to the blockchain. Would the resulting thing be equivalent of twitter? No, it would be slow (it takes about 10 minutes to get transaction to blockchain) and it would most likely not be for free (if it catches on, miners will throw away the messages with low fees). On the other hand, every message would be recorded forever, without any chance of anyone deleting it, censoring it or getting your IP address. Also, the Bitcoin seems to be going strong and doesn't seem like it will go away any time soon, and the infrastructure is super-strong. I want to hack a prototype... maybe... one day.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

rksprst 14y ago

In the tweet display guidelines: "No other social or 3rd party actions may be attached to a Tweet." https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-guidelines https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-guidelines Wonder if that means 3rd party apps can't add actions to tweets like "assign to a user", "translate", "schedule a reply", etc. That might just kill major functionality for apps like HootSuite, CoTweet, Radian6's Engagement Console. Or, since it's under the guidelines for individual tweets, are tweets in the timeline excluded from that limitation?

whamill 14y ago
Tweets in a timeline, on the Twitter feed in the web client, all have the retweet/quote/reply/favourite actions per-tweet so I would expect that they mean each and every tweet displayed anywhere.

ctide 14y ago

Congratulations Dalton Caldwell! Who could have known that Twitter would just hand you the entire game with one stupid maneuver.

dm8 14y ago
It makes things harder for developers. But it doesn't affect end-user at all. Twitter already has eye balls, celebrity users. Average joe doesn't care if Twitter has 100k user cap for third party client. End-user experience is getting better day by day. Ask someone who is not tech savvy is on Twitter.
- jonursenbach 14y ago
  Users will care then their favorite application no longer works.
  - dm8 14y ago
    They will curse the application developer and choose the next best application. In this case, it will be Twitter.

zethraeus 14y ago

It's rather frightening that the only example that they give of a user facing service in the appropriate 'quadrant' is Klout.

ceejayoz 14y ago
Good: Klout Bad: Tweetbot, Storify What is this, Opposite Day? That stopped being fun in kindergarten.

mehulkar 14y ago

Winter is coming.

dm8 14y ago
Which winter are you talking about? Twitter has been tightening the strings for a while now.

state 14y ago

It seems to me that the kinds of applications they are trying to prevent from existing are precisely the ones that they could learn the most from and could provide them with the most new users. I also don't see how this action actually wins them that many more eyes. Are there really that many third party Twitter apps out there?

chj 14y ago

If you are develop!ng for every s!ngle platform on th!s planet today, you are e!ther f!!ked or wa!t!ng to be f!!ked. Un!ted, developers!

galactus 14y ago

I guess twitter thinks it is big enough to stop worrying about pissing third party developers off. In the short term it probably won't hurt them much.

DigitalSea 14y ago

Can you smell that? It's the smell of victory, the smell of Dalton Caldwell lighting a Cuban cigar in celebration of Twitter driving basically every single 3rd party developer over to App.net.

waterlesscloud 14y ago

Remember the Great Twitter Strategy Document Leak of 2009? http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet-2/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-... What happened to those plans? They seemed so smart...

aaronbrethorst 14y ago
New management, new strategy.

DeanCollinsNYC 14y ago

Would the last Twitter developer out please turn off the lights when you leave. Lol this is the beginning of the end for twitter and third party developers. Ever since MyTwitterButler received its first cease and desist it has been a game of footsies with third party developers but with these new rules why would you bother.

jot 14y ago

How would you feel if Google announced that you could only access their services using Chrome? What does it take to activate the antitrust lawyers?

pavel_lishin 14y ago
I'd feel pretty shitty if Microsoft said I could only access Windows Update using Internet Explorer.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
I wonder if "antitrust" and "monopoly" talk are HN forms of Godwin's Law. Before Twitter would be remotely concerned about antitrust, there would have to not be a place with more users that you can talk about your cat's lunch to your heart's content. Facebook has more to fear than Twitter does.

_lex 14y ago

Twitter is making it very unappealing to build on their platform, since developers have to effectively give up a large chunk of autonomy and trust that Twitter's business model won't change again, and that Twitter won't suddenly start competing with them. And anyone who's paying attention knows that that's exactly what Twitter will do, since they don't have a clear, believable business model, and they've done it(destroyed their 'developers') before.

guelo 14y ago

I use Twitter via their official apps, I have tried some of the third party apps but haven't really been impressed. After all this time it didn't seem like the app ecosystem was coming up with anything really innovative besides slightly different ways of organizing the feeds.

dustyreagan 14y ago
That's because they bought the cool third party apps like the TweetDeck and Tweetie, and have since begun shunning third party developers. In short, the official apps were third party apps, and now no one wants to make any additional Twitter apps because Twitter has become hostile to developers. They've closed the door on third party inovation for their platform.
- masklinn 14y ago
  > like the TweetDeck and Tweetie Don't you mean Tweetbot or something? Tweetie was bought by Twitter, rebranded to be the official Twitter client, and in no small part gutted and left to rot (gutted for the mobile version, left to rot for the desktop one).
  - RKearney 14y ago
    >> That's because they bought the cool third party apps like the TweetDeck and Tweetie >Tweetie was bought by Twitter That's what they said. I think you misread that post.
buro9 14y ago
Try twicca on Android. It is substantially faster to use and performs really well (scrolling long lists) on older Android devices. In fact, the official clients are almost unusable on slower/older Android devices, whereas twicca is fast and responsive.

mhartl 14y ago

This is the kind of thing that happens when you don't have a business model.

ashbrahma 14y ago

Anyone know how to check the number of users that have authenticated the apps on the twitter dev portal?

abraham 14y ago
Currently you can't. They used to show those numbers but dropped it, I think, for scaling issues a long while ago. Maybe Twitter will bring it back.

moe 14y ago

R.I.P. Twitter *06/2006 †08/2012

px1999 14y ago

I'm having trouble trying to figure out who Twitter's trying to target with these changes - and can't figure out if: 1. They want to corner the advertiser & business market - ie it's an attack on Hootsuite etc 2. They want to lock out competitors from pwning them on search (Google/Bing incorporating [good] twitter results into their searches would IMO be devastating to twitter - particularly if they didn't embed intents / hueg links to twitter everywhere) 3. They want to own the ecosystem so that twitter clients don't cross-post to Facebook/G+/app.net/favourite social network here 4. (I don't think this is likely) - Twitter thinking that they can somehow squeeze an extra couple of bucks out of each user if they're on an official client via advertising or something similar. . Each of these seems plausible to me, but all of them essentially involve twitter holding customers/data/users hostage which doesn't seem like a great strategy. Is there some angle I'm missing here / reading too much into?

jchung 14y ago
I was also trying to figure out the business rationale for this move. Their 2x2 chart gets us relatively close to understanding their strategy. Here's what it looks like: - Twitter doesn't want to own analytics for business or consumer players. - Twitter doesn't want to own engagement for businesses. - Twitter DOES want to own engagement for consumers. This seems pretty counter-intuitive to me. Since businesses are the ones who actually pay twitter cash, I would have expected them to try to own the whole left side of their chart, and leave developers to create new innovations for the whole right side of the chart. What would you have to believe in order for this to be a good idea? Some possibilities: - Twitter thinks that developers will ruin the consumer experience, slowing their growth. - Twitter thinks that businesses won't pay them unless consumers are tweeting on twitter.com - Twitter doesn't think that analytics or business engagement services will be lucrative enough for them to invest directly in. - Twitter thinks that if the developer community spends its effort in the top-right, it will distract the community from innovating in the other three quadrants, where Twitter wants to see more development to unlock more business-driven revenues (This one is a real longshot, but I'm trying to be comprehensive) - Twitter doesn't care about users tweeting or consuming tweets if they aren't on twitter.com (I'm still struggling to figure out why this is bad for twitter -- any thoughts, HN?)

ukd1 14y ago

Hello App.net.

imrehg 14y ago

I really want to like Twitter, I really do. So many possibilities, so many interesting services built on top of them, it would be a great centre for "online identity", a main front to communicate with friends and audience. Except when they do these kinds of things, and I wonder how on Earth it makes any sense besides "because we can"?

bane 14y ago

So why are they doing this? My guess is to drive users to their clients, so that they can start displaying ads and gather revenue. 3rd party clients won't display Twitter's own ads so there's no way for the service to collect on that.