19 ms·

Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

471 points by joshus 14y ago

mmahemoff 14y ago
In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social analytics”, and “Social influence ranking” Would he rather they put one-paragraph labels on each quadrant? Sometimes phrases that sound like MBA buzzwords (and might be MBA buzzwords) are actually useful too.
- sillysaurus 14y ago
  I think he'd rather Twitter take a firm, unchanging stance as to their policy toward third-party applications built on the Twitter-as-a-platform concept. The buzzword-filled doublespeak in their blog post serves only one purpose: to intimate change while keeping their future options open. Unfortunately, that makes their policies (current or otherwise) about as firm as a loaf of bread.
  - mmahemoff 14y ago
    If so, he didn't express it that way. It just sounds like an unnecessary sideswipe. Anyway, I think the matrix does make it more clear than just saying "we don't want 3rd party twitter clients...and some other stuff".
- refulgentis 14y ago
  The overall issue with the diagram is, not only are they MBA buzzwords, but it's a silly diagram that has no meaning – they're dressing up 'things we don't want you to do anymore' as a technical diagram in a two-dimensional space that makes little to no sense.
  - jmduke 14y ago
    What doesn't make sense about the diagram?
    - glesica 14y ago
      Speaking only for myself, the diagram makes sense, technically speaking, but it is totally unnecessary and adds nothing to my understanding of the article. It's the type of thing I would expect some manager to ask for because there were no pictures on a given page and it needed to be "spiced up".
- brown9-2 14y ago
  Ok, so what is "Social CRM"?
  - mh- 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_CRM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_CRM Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is use of social media services, techniques and technology to enable organisations to engage with their customers. Social CRM is often used as a synonym for Social Media Monitoring, where organisations watch services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for relevant mentions of their product and brand and react accordingly.
dchuk 14y ago
"In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social analytics”, and “Social influence ranking”." Not bullshit, these are demonstrably useful products for people who want to utilize new traffic sources in the interest of making money or growing their business. "But services like Storify and Favstar, which are actually useful and/or fun, those are no good." ummm...ok? Utility is in the eye of the beholder...Twitter is a B2C product, so they're going to try and limit the number of competing services that are stealing B2C market share from them (why would you expect them to be ok with people using alternative Twitter apps instead of the official one?) Now, Twitter is not a B2B company, so it makes sense that they would allow those types of services to continue. It's quite possible they're allowing B2B services that are utilizing the twitter platform to continue operating because they plan to acquire a few of them in the future to try and actually make a profit one day.
- clobber 14y ago
  Let's get one thing straight: these are not products, they're services. Nobody is producing anything here.
  - jmduke 14y ago
    Do you not consider a releasable piece of software a 'product'?
    - mmahemoff 14y ago
      I would tend to think of the whole thing as a service (e.g. "Twitter" - all of its apps, data, brand, users, infrastructure), versus individual apps (e.g. "TweetDeck") being "products".
- droob 14y ago
  This must be the Twitter analog to a Voight-Kampff test, because "social CRM" and "social influence ranking" seem to me to be the fuel for spambots, mindless marketing accounts, and other general filth. The MBA behind this plan would probably stand outside his bakery demanding payment for people stealing smells.
ziadbc 14y ago
Twitter wants to give you access to the data. Their client is their main product. Thus, every 3rd party client is competing with their main product, that seems to be a fact. Theres no way to stop you from building one anyway, twitter knows that. If you go against their rules, you're a revolutionary, and if you win that revolution, they'll have to deal with you. You can't expect however, that the incumbent is going to go around encouraging revolutions against themselves. The only alternative is to encourage everyone to make clients, at which point, they're just a big cloud xmpp server to the world.
- sillysaurus 14y ago
  Twitter had better take a long, hard look at Joel's old essay on Platforms: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html Declaring war on your third-party developers is shortsighted at best, fatal at worst.
  - iandanforth 14y ago
    Perhaps there is a class of people who pay for email apps. I'm not one of them. I don't see twitter as a platform, or at least don't use it as one. It is a communication medium which, for all my usage, could have no developer ecosystem. Professionally I would love to have free access to the Firehose, that's some juicy data. But as a consumer Twitter 'apps' are no more worth my money than email apps.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- ascendant 14y ago
  This completely ignores the fact that Twitter has more than a small amount of its success owed to the vibrant third party ecosystem early on. They're not slowly opening up from a closed position. They're trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle and in the long run, I don't think it will work out well for them.
- 14y ago
andrewfelix 14y ago
Utter hypocrisy that they're discouraging third party clients, after having acquired one. app.net suddenly looks more attractive.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  app.net looks more attractive, until the same shit starts happening there in 5 years. The problem is walled garden social networks. It's a fundamentally bad idea for everyone involved, except the people who own it and can turn a profit. StatusNet/Identica is a much better solution to this problem than yet another walled garden. Free, open source, and federated. How many times does the same shit need to happen before people realize the only long-term solution?
  - MBCook 14y ago
    The possible difference there is that app.net has both a business plan (sell access to post to the service) as well as a feedback model if they do something stupid (people will stop paying them).
    - streptomycin 14y ago
      Sure, that's a difference, but a rather incremental difference IMHO. Not nearly as big a difference as federation and open source, which is what we really need to break out of the walled gardens.
      - Firehed 14y ago
        How many successful open-source platforms are there? I can't think of any. Unlike Free software, platforms have a maintenance cost (servers), and that cost cannot be paid by donated man-hours. The only thing close that I can think of is BitTorrent due to the distrubuted infrastructure, but that's quite impractical to duplicate in this context (how can browsing the content contribute back to hosting and storage automatically?) In an ideal world I agree, but that's not where we live.
jmduke 14y ago
"Matrix: An artificial reality construct created by MBAs to imprison the minds of those upon whom they feed." From the source Gruber linked. Yawn. MBA bashing is a lazy circlejerk and adds nothing constructive to an otherwise valid argument against Twitter's self-effacing API policies.
efsavage 14y ago
Twitter isn't very big in my circles, but of those that use it, none of them use the website.
- bluetidepro 14y ago
  Really? I honestly prefer the website experience better than any Twitter app I've ever used. But I guess that may just be me... Haha
- smacktoward 14y ago
  And this is why Twitter wants to kill the third-party clients. Twitter has decided that ads are going to be its revenue stream. The only way they can guarantee you see their ads is if you use the website or an official client. If nobody uses those, nobody sees the ads, so Twitter makes no revenue. So they have to get your friends onto the website or an official client to stay alive. This logic assumes, of course, that Twitter's web app and official clients are good enough substitutes for the third-party clients that if the third parties go away people will use the official clients rather than just stop using Twitter altogether. Which remains to be seen.
ianstormtaylor 14y ago
Wonder how they got the bright idea to advocate limiting the quadrant named "Consumer Engagement". Surprised they didn't try to make it a bit less obvious.
- voyou 14y ago
  The blog post is actually annoyingly ambiguous - do they want to limit all the stuff in the "consumer engagement" quadrant, or just the "traditional clients," while encouraging other sorts of "consumer engagement" (they mention, and don't make clear if they're in favor of or against, Favstar and Storify).
ThePherocity 14y ago
The writing is on the wall though; Kinda has been for a while. I think this is why App.Net might actually get some traction. People will move when that's where all the cool features are, and none of the crappy ads. Maybe.
lancewiggs 14y ago
I wouldn't have as much immediate issue with this if Twitter's own clients were acceptable - they are not. And this is an asinine move either way.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  Twitter's own clients are fine. You can read tweets and send tweets. That's the basis of the service. It's supposed to be simple. Why don't you like it?
  - rcknight 14y ago
    The mac client has not been updated since June 2011 ... hardly well supported!
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      Not really a valid reason. What is it about the client that needs to be updated?
      - smackfu 14y ago
        Amusingly, it doesn't even use Twitter's own picture service for photos attachments which is a year old at this point. It still uses yfrog.
    - jcromartie 14y ago
      I never would have noticed, since it continues to work without any issues for me.
  - Tichy 14y ago
    TweetDeck used to do Facebook+Twitter. Will they continue to work on the Facebook part? Unlikely - and there won't be other clients that do both...
  - jopt 14y ago
    Is that really all there is to it? Are all apps equal provided they have CRUD?
ascendant 14y ago
The silver lining here is that this finally lit enough of a fire under my ass to go sign up for app.net as a developer.
goronbjorn 14y ago
Is this more evidence that they haven't completely figured out their own business model yet?
rjsamson 14y ago
I don't see this ending well for them. Alienating the very developer base that helped them grow as a platform early on is a huge mistake. As an aside, I feel even better about backing App.net after seeing this news.
- jsilence 14y ago
  But who is keeping app.net from doing the same thing once they killed Twitter and reached a size where they can say: Thanks for all your friends, now get off of our platform. We need open protocols and a decentralized social network where we have different implementations with focus on different use cases which are still able to communicate with one another. A good chunk of the protocols and implementations is already there with OAuth, Activity streams, salmon, RSS and such. And there are already open sourced implementations like status.net and others alike. The solution is already there. We only need to start using it.
uptown 14y ago
I find it ironic that the company that's created Bootstrap - an entire toolkit encouraging developers to adopt their site's visual style - is so opposed to any other aspect of following their lead.
- eric-hu 14y ago
  It seems to me that if Twitter were able to offer their API freely to devs at zero cost to themselves, they would do so. Twitter bootstrap, on the other hand, is something they built for themselves to reduce the friction of creating rich, consistent UIs. Developing it is a sunk cost. Offering it free to the world should cost them nothing as it's hosted on Github [1]. Like others in this thread, I lament that Twitter has become less egalitarian. Moving forward, developers with one idea of usage will have more Twitter clout than developers with "lesser" ideas, but Twitter has bills to pay and investors to answer to. It's far from an ideal world, but I can't offer them a better solution for their problems. [1] https://github.com/plans/ https://github.com/plans/ all plans offer 'unlimited public repos'
smegel 14y ago
If app.net gets the userbase, i.e. the people I want to follow, i will be over there in a flash.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
cletus 14y ago
This doesn't surprise me at all. When you develop on someone else's platform, you have to walk a fine line between not being successful at all and being too successful such that the platform provider co-opts your business (maybe you get lucky and get bought out). This is nothing new. Such moves as this were (IMHO) inevitable. They'll slowly chip away at anything they see as taking revenue from them. The part I disagree with is that this will doom Twitter. It will not. They've already achieved a certain level of success. Most people use and will continue to use the Website or the official client and be happy with that. I do believe that Twitter is doomed to be acquired however. Apple seems the likely frontrunner for this but I think Twitter needs Apple more than Apple needs Twitter at this point. Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace. There are many reasons I'm glad about Facebook's floundering market debut. This is one of them: it's taking the wind out of the sails of the social hype (IMHO).
- andrewfelix 14y ago
  Interesting point about being acquired. Do you think perhaps restricting 3rd party clients is a way to make them more appealing to a potential buyer like Apple?
  - PakG1 14y ago
    If they're appealing to Apple, I'd say it's because they already have such a big partnership with Apple in iOS integration. For whatever reasons the partnership was appealing, an acquisition would likewise be appealing.
    - Hari_Seldon 14y ago
      Maybe, but Apple would be inclined to make it Mac / iOS only, which would be counter productive. The other non Apple stuff has had a strategic importance, iTunes for windows enabled them to sell iPods and Safari for windows helped with website compatibility. Can't see this happening.
- 14y ago
dinkumthinkum 14y ago
Twitter's developer problem is probably at about level 9 right now. My question is what's really the big deal. Twitter can do what they want and really more to the point, I don't think Twitter should be the primary focus of innovation from our community. It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages. I get it it, it's amazing ... but come on, we can get past Twitter.
- andrewfelix 14y ago
  >It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages. This maybe true for a lot of tweets. But my stream is filled with live updates of interesting stuff from around the world. Twitter has been instrumental in getting news out of war zones for example.
  - colmvp 14y ago
    Yeah I don't know why Twitter gets so much hate. It is similar to Reddit: What you get is what you subscribe to.
thought_alarm 14y ago
Of all the social media and web services that have cropped up in the last 5 years, Twitter was the one that really filled me with joy. It's so simple! It's just plain text in bite sized pieces at a time. And it's universal! It works just as well on state of the art hardware as it does on a crappy SMS dumbphone or green-screen serial terminal. And it's as compelling in Egypt or Pakistan as it is in New York or London. Whenever I get fed up with the complextiy of Facebook or Google+ I'll load up Twitter on an old Apple II, via TTYtter and a serial connection; I'll watch the green text scroll along at 1200 baud and think about how this one simple, geeky text service, pure as a 1980s BBS, somehow made it, worldwide, in 2012. And now they're hellbent on ruining all of that. Fuck Twitter.
- AVTizzle 14y ago
  Would love to see a screenshot (or picture?) of that!
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    A short video clip would probably go viral on YouTube
    - crb 14y ago
      Here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM
      - keithpeter 14y ago
        Love the graphics! Excellent.
mmaunder 14y ago
Unless platforms like Facbeook or Twitter make a significant amount of money from their devs, the way Microsoft or Apple does, telling their devs to go pound sand at some point is inevitable.
- btipling 14y ago
  Facebook makes a lot of money from their devs.
  - yen223 14y ago
    Not nearly enough, by all accounts.
    - rhp 14y ago
      Zynga accounted for 15% of Facebook's revenue in Q1. Although Zynga's contribution declined compared to last year, payments and fees revenue (mostly from apps) doubled over last year to $186 million. That's not an insignificant amount. Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/zynga-made-up-15-of-facebooks-revenue-in-q1-down-from-19-a-year-ago/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/zynga-made-up-15-of-faceboo...
      - stevejabs 14y ago
        That should horrify FB. That means there will always be a direct correlation between Zynga's stock and FB's stock on a daily basis. I would not want one (3rd-party) company accounting for 15% of my revenue.
sequoia 14y ago
What client devs have actually stopped development and abandoned/shut down their applications in response to Twitter's client TOS changes? I hear lots of griping and moaning it seems like lots of the major client players are developing nonetheless, which says to twitter "keep doing what you're doing."
sailfrog 14y ago
Grunter owns Twitter
macarthy12 14y ago
I wonder if twitter have a $50 app.net account?
maxpow4h 14y ago
From here, I think we should move to a distributed model, like email and xmpp. It needs to be Open Source so anyone can run it and everyone owns their data. It needs to be compatible with current Twitter apps so all it requires is setting the API root. It needs to be distributed so anyone can follow anyone anywhere. There is no owner or root, there is no place to shut down. Proof of concept: https://nstatus.herokuapp.com https://nstatus.herokuapp.com Source: https://github.com/maxpow4h/nekomimi https://github.com/maxpow4h/nekomimi I wrote about the requirements of it here: http://maxpow4h.com/blog/twitter/ http://maxpow4h.com/blog/twitter/ edit: you can use any username with any password to sign in to nstatus. It then uses that password for your username. You can even do this from the official iOS Twitter app, just sign in.
- Steko 14y ago
  How do you control spam?
  - maxpow4h 14y ago
    I don't, it's just a proof of concept. In the distributed implementation I would have a chain of trust from the people you follow, where if you report someone as a spammer, the server that represents people who follow you could look at your list and filter spammers based off this. You could also set the depth to traverse. There is a lot you could do with this. I'm not saying my implementation is right, but someone needs to do it. Tweeting is a type of communication and needs to be distributed.
- seagreen 14y ago
  What would its advantages be over status.net/identi.ca?
  - maxpow4h 14y ago
    status.net is great, but I would have federation where you can add a server as a source rather than just a user. Then if that server has a @fred, @fred would always be resolved to the @fred on that server. In conflicts, you should be able to resolve these conflicts and proxy names yourself. (my proof of concept doesn't do this) Maybe even taking Diaspora and taking out everything except 140char status updates AND adding an API compatible with Twitter apps would be a better approach. edit: clarity to first sentence.
joering2 14y ago
Sometimes I tend to see the dark side of human in everything they do. Sorry, its just the way I am. I say when twitter was still this little chick, their approach was "we love all users, we welcome engineers; build amazing tools and surprise us!". I think the reason for that was to speed up the process of spreading the word - a simple fact that geek working on twitter 3rd party is still a human with plenty of friends to spread the word about twitter - so he can be helpful: let him spend his time doing what he likes doing the best - programming and he will become our cheap (free) PR tube. But now I bet most of a new age civilization knows or uses twitter. So it is time for a reality check: "fuck off of our platform; we don't need you anymore! You got all your friends to know twitter, some even addict to it; now stay away from trying to run your pathetic queries, using our own data stream". Just my version/2c. edit: my understanding is that Dorsey still has the most to say in the twitter world. With all its nastiness going on between twitter curtain, I say stay the hell far away from any startup he will do in the future. Sorry, but if he signs up half of the world on his square, what on Earth is stopping him from switching 2.5% to 10% fee?? nothing!! At least the past (present) shows he has the balls to execute moves that average tweeting Joe is not a fan of: shutting down 3rd parties, kicking out linkedin, shutting down instagram access, etc. Bottom line: stay away!
- pedalpete 14y ago
  Square doesn't have a network effect, it doesn't really matter if one store uses square, and the neighboring store uses google wallet, dwolla, or something else.
  - natrius 14y ago
    Square and payment systems in general most certainly do have network effects. For instance, I don't have a Discover card because it's not worth the hassle of checking whether each merchant accepts it. Network effects are the lion's share of the justification behind Square's Starbucks deal.
  - tnorthcutt 14y ago
    Yes it does. If their mobile payment app becomes the de facto standard, not accepting payment from that app could become as bad as not accepting credit cards.
mirkules 14y ago
If Twitter's business is threatened by third-party apps, why not charge for an API license? I also can't quite understand why developers expect a free API from services like Twitter and then complain when something changes? What is the business advantage of Twitter (or Facebook, or what-have-you) releasing a free, public API to anyone who asks, and how did they plan to monetize it when it got popular? You can't build your business model around "here, use my service for free" and not have a plan how to convert either the users of the 3rd party developers' software or the 3rd party developers themselves into paying customers (or monetize on that somehow, i.e. mining data, selling ads, etc). Maybe I'm just being naive -- I honestly don't have much experience dealing with these sorts of things, so I would love it if someone could break it down.
- mark_l_watson 14y ago
  I agree with you. Google's model is pretty good with most of their 25+ APIs having free tiers. Free is nice but being in a real business relationship feels better to me because it is more likely to be sustainable. Microsoft's API marketplace has the same solid sustainable feeling. If a business idea requires free use of other people's services then think of another idea.
shuzchen 14y ago
I wonder if this is coming because they can't keep up with the write load. The writes that come from these third party apps (that enable messaging multiple people, or queuing/delaying tweets) might throw a wrench in their system if it doesn't follow the natural usage they've designed it for. The only other reason I can fathom why they would doing this is they eventually intend to heavily push ads over their network, something that third party apps could interfere with.
- ajanuary 14y ago
  > I wonder if this is coming because they can't keep up with the write load. Wouldn't an easier solution for that be to tighten the rate limiting for posting? > The only other reason I can fathom why they would doing this is they eventually intend to heavily push ads over their network I think that's pretty much it.
ricardobeat 14y ago
> To prevent malicious use of the Twitter API and gain an understanding bla bla bla... Translation: so that we can charge even light API users. This will surely backfire - some services will switch from API usage to screen-scraping, resulting in an even higher load on twitter's servers.
- virmundi 14y ago
  At that point Twitter will simply block IP address, or some such. Sure there will be a game of catch me if you can, but the end is that no one really wins, and Twitter may suffer because people will use it to bad mouth Twitter. Enough user sentiment, even if it start from the devs of a few highly used apps, and Twitter might want to reconsider.
  - bad_user 14y ago
    If the client is native, you can do that scrapping client side. Say your app has 10000 users. Assuming they can detect this (not likely) what are they gonna do? Block 10000 IPs?
  - bad_user 14y ago
    If the client is native, you can do that scrapping client side. Say your app has 10000 users. Assuming they can detect this (not likely) what are they gonna do? Block 10000 IPs?
lukejduncan 14y ago
Best description of Klout I've seen to date: "utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense"
gcmartinelli 14y ago
I wonder how Twitter's developers are feeling about these changes... Devs tend to be pro-openess, I imagine this to have a bitter taste for most of them.
Sniffnoy 14y ago
People keep talking about Facebook and Myspace, but they lack(ed) full-on third-party clients, so what I'm wondering about is the LiveJournal comparison. LiveJournal too had and has third-party clients. And though hardly popular in the English-speaking world these days, it's still going. But I don't think it has similar guidelines. So what's the comparison?
taybin 14y ago
Has anyone considered that twitter is actually pretty stupid?
j45 14y ago
If I can't use Hootsuite, I can't use twitter.
- robinwarren 14y ago
  enterprise clients was one of the things in the 'good quadrants'. I'd assume hootsuite may well fit that description.
  - j45 14y ago
    Hope so.. even if they have a high follower count
steele 14y ago
It's all utter vainglorious and masturbatory nonsense unless it's Apple's App Store "curation"
kintamanimatt 14y ago
Why wouldn't they just just charge heavy non-client API users and offer (cheap?) paid plans to users who want to use third party clients, leaving the rest to use an ad-supported web interface? This is the best solution long term which wouldn't really piss off anybody or nuke the ecosystem, while embracing the realities of running a business.
sdoering 14y ago
> So Klout, which is utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense, > that’s OK. But services like Storify and Favstar, which are > actually useful and/or fun, those are no good. Seconded. Just seconded. Know, why I keep using Twitter less and less...
dchest 14y ago
Did anyone manage to extract API key from the official Twitter client?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
robinwarren 14y ago
I don't really get the reaction here, and in general it feels like something of a mouth foaming rant rather than any reasonable discussion: >In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social analytics”, and “Social influence ranking” Some people believe those terms are bullshit, others less so. This argument looks more like shit slinging than anything else. > So Klout, which is utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense, that’s OK. Agreed, it is. Whilst correct, this doesn't prove a lot. I don't think the author is trying to claim they are allowed because they are 'vainglorious masturbatory nonsense', just pointing out that they are. If things you don't agree with can still exist after a new rule is enacted it doesn't make that rule wrong. If only things you don't like can exist because of that rule then maybe it's time to start worrying. > But services like Storify and Favstar, which are actually useful and/or fun, those are no good. I took a look at these. I'd personally disagree that they are useful or fun. Just my opinion. > And don’t even get me started on Twitter turning against client apps. For chrissake Twitter’s own app started life as a third-party client. And this means they should allow third-party clients forever? At a point in their development they obviously weren't putting as much effort into client apps as third-party developers. They decided to focus on that, made some purchases and now are focussing on it. This is part of the risk for third-party developers on any platform, a point which has been made here a number of times.
littlejim84 14y ago
Couldn't Twitter just arrange a price for "business" usage of their API? The main people getting affected by this are other clients or other intensive uses of their API, but those very people are most probably trying to make a profit themselves (HootSuite for example) so why not just charge for the API and so leave the restricted API for free use. Or am I missing the point?
throwa 14y ago
Developers seem to flock to platforms like Apple, Facebook and Twitter based on the fact that they have a large and growing user base without giving thought to this issue of commoditization of complements and how the ultimately destroy the business or livelihood of these developers. Most people building products or sharecropping on other people's platform never make meaningful income and yet those platform keep will prefer to announce large sums paid out to developers to encourage you to keep building complements. Apple will claim they paid out $5 billion but spread the numerous app developers it becomes peanut and not enough to pay their bills. They won't tell you that to pay out $5bn they made atleast $2billion based on their 30% cut. They don't tell you that iOS app success is a "lottery": 60% (or more) of developers don't break even http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lottery-and-60-of-developers-dont-break-even/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lo... http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-failing-like-its-1999/ http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-fail... I really hope people will think hard before building their business on the back of Apple, Facebook, Twitter or any such platform. You can use them as as distribution without being dependent on them and that is the way to go. Be your own bitch and not a Twitter, Apple or Facebook bitch: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bitch/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...
radarsat1 14y ago
Well it's not like alternatives don't exist. Of all the popular social media services, twitter has got to be one of the easiest to reimplement, it's only social inertia that keeps Twitter going. (Which says a lot about the power of social inertia.) As usual what is needed is a decentralized approach, but that always takes time to catch on even if it can be made to work.
Tichy 14y ago
Why couldn't Microblogging work like email (or Macroblogging)? Some people email through some provider or host their blogs at wordpress.com, others host their own. Big bloggers pay a lot for their infrastructure, amateuer bloggers get free blogs supported by ads. Still not sure if Twitter isn't just blogs that include a friends list and a reader (kind of like Tumblr, which seems to be taking off, too...). And the short messages.
- thinkingisfun 14y ago
  There is something like that, and it does work. But... does anyone know more sites that support OStatus? I know of these: http://rstat.us/ http://rstat.us/ http://identi.ca/ http://identi.ca/ http://status.net/ http://status.net/ Which is nice, but not really much. Wouldn't it also make sense for, say, Wordpress or phpBB (or any and all other blogging and forum software, these are just examples), to also support OStatus? Everything that has content and updates, basically. Why not build OStatus apps instead of Twitter apps? Am I missing something? Or are there other, similar standards/attempts? Because to be perfectly honest, I STILL haven't found the tutorial that just "tells me what to do" to go from offering an RSS feed to supporting OStatus, I'm kinda dense when it comes to these things. I need code examples :/ It can be pseudo-code, but it needs to be complete, instead of just a high-level verbal description ala "first you implement subhubbub, oh, and then there is salmon". I digress, but any and all hints would be appreciated. After all, it's for a good cause ^^
thirdsun 14y ago
I always had the impression that bands and musicians made myspace what it was. Seriously, they seemed to have every single band you could think of. That in combination with the Google Search results deal (which still seems to be running) was a winner.
countessa 14y ago
can't say I blame them really. They have a product, they have the infrastructure to support it....why shouldn't they have right of first refusal on how to monetize the thing? Seems to me that developers are getting all pissy because they can't have free reign to a platform that isn't even theirs. Perhaps, at the end of the day, Twitter doesn't care - they don't need the developers as early adopters anymore and it must be a fair old strain to keep the api infrastructure supporting them when the resources could be more profitably used building something else inside the company.
masklinn 14y ago
So from the "fantastic" quadrant scheme, basically they don't want users (which they re-labelled as consumers) to actually use (engage with) the service, instead they want: 1. "consumers" to be analyzed 2. Companies to use the service Well at least it's rather clear what the new and future values of Twitter are.
- ajanuary 14y ago
  It's not that they don't want users to engage with the service, it's that they want as much control over that interaction as they can possibly get away with. Cynically, the more garauntess they can give to the other three quadrants, the more money they can make from them. More positively, things like requiring reply/retweet/follow buttons with embedded content encourages more interaction with the service. If a (lazy) journalist makes up an article from collating a few tweets you're now encouraged to reply, retweet and interact with twitter right there rather than using the Facebook Connect comments system at the bottom of the page. Their value to the other three quadrants is interactions. They're not stupid enough to intentionally reduce that, though one could argue they're not going about it the best way.
nicholassmith 14y ago
I don't know if this is the worst thing that Twitter could have done, but it's probably fairly high up there. I wonder what people like Tapbot and thinking right now, they're grandfathered in for some very, very specific agreements but they know that one misstep and they'll end up out in the cold or paying a fortune. But then what does that mean for a Tweetbot user like myself? Less incremental updates? One day the application breaks? Who knows, too early to tell. I'm mostly surprised Twitter isn't just leveraging the fact they are pumping out that many requests and slipping ads or promoted tweets or promoted tweeters into the API stream and making cash off that. Seems like it'd make sense.
debacle 14y ago
Twitter are being shits, but as a developer on the Twitter platform, what could you really expect?
jcromartie 14y ago
Are people missing the fact that existing Twitter clients can keep their token allocation and double it? And new ones are limited to 100K only by default (they can ask for more)? Since when did people consider unlimited access to Twitter's API an unalienable right? It is their platform, and their API. It's also completely free. Twitter is absolutely free to limit usage of their own API however they wish. If it means they want to change the rate limiting on their servers, I see no problem with that.
- dasil003 14y ago
  No one is arguing they aren't in their rights to do this. I mean sure a lot of people are indignant about the fact that Twitter became what it was through the ingenuity of the developer community, and without them Twitter would never have grown to its current size, but that's neither here nor there. The bottom line is that Twitter's communications make it clear that they are grasping at straws for their profitability and that no developer is safe if they think you are capturing too much value. Obviously you always run a risk building on someone else's platform, but Twitter's direction and language around this would make any developer a fool to start anything new on that platform.
  - jcromartie 14y ago
    But nothing, fundamentally, has changed. Twitter has always been grasping at straws for profitability, and they have always been in control of their platform. Would you have not been a fool to build something on Twitter last year? You would just be betting that they wouldn't introduce limits in the future, vs. knowing those limits today.
    - dasil003 14y ago
      Well it's been sort of clear which way the wind was blowing for a while now, but definitely 3 or 4 years ago Twitter was bursting at the seems with developer support for innovation in all directions. It was an extremely welcoming platform compared to Facebook and iOS. Their developer PR has completely reversed that. Of course if you're cynical you could have called it from the very beginning, but the point is it wasn't wholly unreasonable to believe that Twitter was willing to let developers capture real value in exchange for becoming gargantuan and providing critical infrastructure (ie. the old changing the world thing). Whereas now it's very very clear that Twitter is not willing to share any significant value. They want to capture it all, and they are adjusting the ToS to put them in a position to cut people off at the knees the minute they smell some value escaping from the ecosystem.
paulhauggis 14y ago
This is why I don't base my entire business on someone else's platform. They could make one little change and destroy your entire business overnight.
stephenlovell 14y ago
The large swath of discussion seems to be focusing on App Development, which is probably the hardest hit. However, there's another area that has gotten me wondering, non-app, non-client based websites using the API, in reference to the Display Guidelines..er Rules. This is the bit specifically. "Users must have a consistent experience wherever they interact with Tweets, whether on Twitter.com, a mobile client, website, or in an application developed with the Twitter API" So lets say that I go to GitHub and grab a little jQuery plugin to pull in my tweets on my personal portfolio. Does that also mean I have to make sure I include my own avatar, my username, Tweet actions, and twitter branding, among other things? What if those elements are unnecessary to the design or intention of what I'm doing on the site? And then there's the fact that all of these jQuery plugins are going to have to start implementing authenticated access (if they weren't already, which many seem to not be.) I don't have access to data on the matter, but I would surmise that there's a significant number of personal and portfolio sites out there pulling in tweets that are either not authenticated, or are modifying the tweet display in some way. All the ones I've interacted with have settings for turning avatar display on or off, or unlinking hash tags or links, etc. Thoughts?
codegeek 14y ago
Now I am convinced that I will never depend 100% on a third party platform/API for a serious business.
seanp2k2 14y ago
The reason: they found out that it's hard to make money when users can trivially strip out your ads.

471 points by joshus 14y ago

In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social analytics”, and “Social influence ranking” Would he rather they put one-paragraph labels on each quadrant? Sometimes phrases that sound like MBA buzzwords (and might be MBA buzzwords) are actually useful too.

sillysaurus 14y ago
I think he'd rather Twitter take a firm, unchanging stance as to their policy toward third-party applications built on the Twitter-as-a-platform concept. The buzzword-filled doublespeak in their blog post serves only one purpose: to intimate change while keeping their future options open. Unfortunately, that makes their policies (current or otherwise) about as firm as a loaf of bread.
- mmahemoff 14y ago
  If so, he didn't express it that way. It just sounds like an unnecessary sideswipe. Anyway, I think the matrix does make it more clear than just saying "we don't want 3rd party twitter clients...and some other stuff".
refulgentis 14y ago
The overall issue with the diagram is, not only are they MBA buzzwords, but it's a silly diagram that has no meaning – they're dressing up 'things we don't want you to do anymore' as a technical diagram in a two-dimensional space that makes little to no sense.
- jmduke 14y ago
  What doesn't make sense about the diagram?
  - glesica 14y ago
    Speaking only for myself, the diagram makes sense, technically speaking, but it is totally unnecessary and adds nothing to my understanding of the article. It's the type of thing I would expect some manager to ask for because there were no pictures on a given page and it needed to be "spiced up".
brown9-2 14y ago
Ok, so what is "Social CRM"?
- mh- 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_CRM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_CRM Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is use of social media services, techniques and technology to enable organisations to engage with their customers. Social CRM is often used as a synonym for Social Media Monitoring, where organisations watch services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for relevant mentions of their product and brand and react accordingly.

dchuk 14y ago

"In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social analytics”, and “Social influence ranking”." Not bullshit, these are demonstrably useful products for people who want to utilize new traffic sources in the interest of making money or growing their business. "But services like Storify and Favstar, which are actually useful and/or fun, those are no good." ummm...ok? Utility is in the eye of the beholder...Twitter is a B2C product, so they're going to try and limit the number of competing services that are stealing B2C market share from them (why would you expect them to be ok with people using alternative Twitter apps instead of the official one?) Now, Twitter is not a B2B company, so it makes sense that they would allow those types of services to continue. It's quite possible they're allowing B2B services that are utilizing the twitter platform to continue operating because they plan to acquire a few of them in the future to try and actually make a profit one day.

clobber 14y ago
Let's get one thing straight: these are not products, they're services. Nobody is producing anything here.
- jmduke 14y ago
  Do you not consider a releasable piece of software a 'product'?
  - mmahemoff 14y ago
    I would tend to think of the whole thing as a service (e.g. "Twitter" - all of its apps, data, brand, users, infrastructure), versus individual apps (e.g. "TweetDeck") being "products".
droob 14y ago
This must be the Twitter analog to a Voight-Kampff test, because "social CRM" and "social influence ranking" seem to me to be the fuel for spambots, mindless marketing accounts, and other general filth. The MBA behind this plan would probably stand outside his bakery demanding payment for people stealing smells.

ziadbc 14y ago

Twitter wants to give you access to the data. Their client is their main product. Thus, every 3rd party client is competing with their main product, that seems to be a fact. Theres no way to stop you from building one anyway, twitter knows that. If you go against their rules, you're a revolutionary, and if you win that revolution, they'll have to deal with you. You can't expect however, that the incumbent is going to go around encouraging revolutions against themselves. The only alternative is to encourage everyone to make clients, at which point, they're just a big cloud xmpp server to the world.

sillysaurus 14y ago
Twitter had better take a long, hard look at Joel's old essay on Platforms: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html Declaring war on your third-party developers is shortsighted at best, fatal at worst.
- iandanforth 14y ago
  Perhaps there is a class of people who pay for email apps. I'm not one of them. I don't see twitter as a platform, or at least don't use it as one. It is a communication medium which, for all my usage, could have no developer ecosystem. Professionally I would love to have free access to the Firehose, that's some juicy data. But as a consumer Twitter 'apps' are no more worth my money than email apps.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
ascendant 14y ago
This completely ignores the fact that Twitter has more than a small amount of its success owed to the vibrant third party ecosystem early on. They're not slowly opening up from a closed position. They're trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle and in the long run, I don't think it will work out well for them.
14y ago

andrewfelix 14y ago

Utter hypocrisy that they're discouraging third party clients, after having acquired one. app.net suddenly looks more attractive.

streptomycin 14y ago
app.net looks more attractive, until the same shit starts happening there in 5 years. The problem is walled garden social networks. It's a fundamentally bad idea for everyone involved, except the people who own it and can turn a profit. StatusNet/Identica is a much better solution to this problem than yet another walled garden. Free, open source, and federated. How many times does the same shit need to happen before people realize the only long-term solution?
- MBCook 14y ago
  The possible difference there is that app.net has both a business plan (sell access to post to the service) as well as a feedback model if they do something stupid (people will stop paying them).
  - streptomycin 14y ago
    Sure, that's a difference, but a rather incremental difference IMHO. Not nearly as big a difference as federation and open source, which is what we really need to break out of the walled gardens.
    - Firehed 14y ago
      How many successful open-source platforms are there? I can't think of any. Unlike Free software, platforms have a maintenance cost (servers), and that cost cannot be paid by donated man-hours. The only thing close that I can think of is BitTorrent due to the distrubuted infrastructure, but that's quite impractical to duplicate in this context (how can browsing the content contribute back to hosting and storage automatically?) In an ideal world I agree, but that's not where we live.

jmduke 14y ago

"Matrix: An artificial reality construct created by MBAs to imprison the minds of those upon whom they feed." From the source Gruber linked. Yawn. MBA bashing is a lazy circlejerk and adds nothing constructive to an otherwise valid argument against Twitter's self-effacing API policies.

efsavage 14y ago

Twitter isn't very big in my circles, but of those that use it, none of them use the website.

bluetidepro 14y ago
Really? I honestly prefer the website experience better than any Twitter app I've ever used. But I guess that may just be me... Haha
smacktoward 14y ago
And this is why Twitter wants to kill the third-party clients. Twitter has decided that ads are going to be its revenue stream. The only way they can guarantee you see their ads is if you use the website or an official client. If nobody uses those, nobody sees the ads, so Twitter makes no revenue. So they have to get your friends onto the website or an official client to stay alive. This logic assumes, of course, that Twitter's web app and official clients are good enough substitutes for the third-party clients that if the third parties go away people will use the official clients rather than just stop using Twitter altogether. Which remains to be seen.

ianstormtaylor 14y ago

Wonder how they got the bright idea to advocate limiting the quadrant named "Consumer Engagement". Surprised they didn't try to make it a bit less obvious.

voyou 14y ago
The blog post is actually annoyingly ambiguous - do they want to limit all the stuff in the "consumer engagement" quadrant, or just the "traditional clients," while encouraging other sorts of "consumer engagement" (they mention, and don't make clear if they're in favor of or against, Favstar and Storify).

ThePherocity 14y ago

The writing is on the wall though; Kinda has been for a while. I think this is why App.Net might actually get some traction. People will move when that's where all the cool features are, and none of the crappy ads. Maybe.

lancewiggs 14y ago

I wouldn't have as much immediate issue with this if Twitter's own clients were acceptable - they are not. And this is an asinine move either way.

k-mcgrady 14y ago
Twitter's own clients are fine. You can read tweets and send tweets. That's the basis of the service. It's supposed to be simple. Why don't you like it?
- rcknight 14y ago
  The mac client has not been updated since June 2011 ... hardly well supported!
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    Not really a valid reason. What is it about the client that needs to be updated?
    - smackfu 14y ago
      Amusingly, it doesn't even use Twitter's own picture service for photos attachments which is a year old at this point. It still uses yfrog.
  - jcromartie 14y ago
    I never would have noticed, since it continues to work without any issues for me.
- Tichy 14y ago
  TweetDeck used to do Facebook+Twitter. Will they continue to work on the Facebook part? Unlikely - and there won't be other clients that do both...
- jopt 14y ago
  Is that really all there is to it? Are all apps equal provided they have CRUD?

ascendant 14y ago

The silver lining here is that this finally lit enough of a fire under my ass to go sign up for app.net as a developer.

goronbjorn 14y ago

Is this more evidence that they haven't completely figured out their own business model yet?

rjsamson 14y ago

I don't see this ending well for them. Alienating the very developer base that helped them grow as a platform early on is a huge mistake. As an aside, I feel even better about backing App.net after seeing this news.

jsilence 14y ago
But who is keeping app.net from doing the same thing once they killed Twitter and reached a size where they can say: Thanks for all your friends, now get off of our platform. We need open protocols and a decentralized social network where we have different implementations with focus on different use cases which are still able to communicate with one another. A good chunk of the protocols and implementations is already there with OAuth, Activity streams, salmon, RSS and such. And there are already open sourced implementations like status.net and others alike. The solution is already there. We only need to start using it.

uptown 14y ago

I find it ironic that the company that's created Bootstrap - an entire toolkit encouraging developers to adopt their site's visual style - is so opposed to any other aspect of following their lead.

eric-hu 14y ago
It seems to me that if Twitter were able to offer their API freely to devs at zero cost to themselves, they would do so. Twitter bootstrap, on the other hand, is something they built for themselves to reduce the friction of creating rich, consistent UIs. Developing it is a sunk cost. Offering it free to the world should cost them nothing as it's hosted on Github [1]. Like others in this thread, I lament that Twitter has become less egalitarian. Moving forward, developers with one idea of usage will have more Twitter clout than developers with "lesser" ideas, but Twitter has bills to pay and investors to answer to. It's far from an ideal world, but I can't offer them a better solution for their problems. [1] https://github.com/plans/ https://github.com/plans/ all plans offer 'unlimited public repos'

smegel 14y ago

If app.net gets the userbase, i.e. the people I want to follow, i will be over there in a flash.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

cletus 14y ago

This doesn't surprise me at all. When you develop on someone else's platform, you have to walk a fine line between not being successful at all and being too successful such that the platform provider co-opts your business (maybe you get lucky and get bought out). This is nothing new. Such moves as this were (IMHO) inevitable. They'll slowly chip away at anything they see as taking revenue from them. The part I disagree with is that this will doom Twitter. It will not. They've already achieved a certain level of success. Most people use and will continue to use the Website or the official client and be happy with that. I do believe that Twitter is doomed to be acquired however. Apple seems the likely frontrunner for this but I think Twitter needs Apple more than Apple needs Twitter at this point. Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace. There are many reasons I'm glad about Facebook's floundering market debut. This is one of them: it's taking the wind out of the sails of the social hype (IMHO).

andrewfelix 14y ago
Interesting point about being acquired. Do you think perhaps restricting 3rd party clients is a way to make them more appealing to a potential buyer like Apple?
- PakG1 14y ago
  If they're appealing to Apple, I'd say it's because they already have such a big partnership with Apple in iOS integration. For whatever reasons the partnership was appealing, an acquisition would likewise be appealing.
  - Hari_Seldon 14y ago
    Maybe, but Apple would be inclined to make it Mac / iOS only, which would be counter productive. The other non Apple stuff has had a strategic importance, iTunes for windows enabled them to sell iPods and Safari for windows helped with website compatibility. Can't see this happening.
14y ago

dinkumthinkum 14y ago

Twitter's developer problem is probably at about level 9 right now. My question is what's really the big deal. Twitter can do what they want and really more to the point, I don't think Twitter should be the primary focus of innovation from our community. It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages. I get it it, it's amazing ... but come on, we can get past Twitter.

andrewfelix 14y ago
>It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages. This maybe true for a lot of tweets. But my stream is filled with live updates of interesting stuff from around the world. Twitter has been instrumental in getting news out of war zones for example.
- colmvp 14y ago
  Yeah I don't know why Twitter gets so much hate. It is similar to Reddit: What you get is what you subscribe to.

thought_alarm 14y ago

Of all the social media and web services that have cropped up in the last 5 years, Twitter was the one that really filled me with joy. It's so simple! It's just plain text in bite sized pieces at a time. And it's universal! It works just as well on state of the art hardware as it does on a crappy SMS dumbphone or green-screen serial terminal. And it's as compelling in Egypt or Pakistan as it is in New York or London. Whenever I get fed up with the complextiy of Facebook or Google+ I'll load up Twitter on an old Apple II, via TTYtter and a serial connection; I'll watch the green text scroll along at 1200 baud and think about how this one simple, geeky text service, pure as a 1980s BBS, somehow made it, worldwide, in 2012. And now they're hellbent on ruining all of that. Fuck Twitter.

AVTizzle 14y ago
Would love to see a screenshot (or picture?) of that!
- keithpeter 14y ago
  A short video clip would probably go viral on YouTube
  - crb 14y ago
    Here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      Love the graphics! Excellent.

mmaunder 14y ago

Unless platforms like Facbeook or Twitter make a significant amount of money from their devs, the way Microsoft or Apple does, telling their devs to go pound sand at some point is inevitable.

btipling 14y ago
Facebook makes a lot of money from their devs.
- yen223 14y ago
  Not nearly enough, by all accounts.
  - rhp 14y ago
    Zynga accounted for 15% of Facebook's revenue in Q1. Although Zynga's contribution declined compared to last year, payments and fees revenue (mostly from apps) doubled over last year to $186 million. That's not an insignificant amount. Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/zynga-made-up-15-of-facebooks-revenue-in-q1-down-from-19-a-year-ago/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/zynga-made-up-15-of-faceboo...
    - stevejabs 14y ago
      That should horrify FB. That means there will always be a direct correlation between Zynga's stock and FB's stock on a daily basis. I would not want one (3rd-party) company accounting for 15% of my revenue.

sequoia 14y ago

What client devs have actually stopped development and abandoned/shut down their applications in response to Twitter's client TOS changes? I hear lots of griping and moaning it seems like lots of the major client players are developing nonetheless, which says to twitter "keep doing what you're doing."

sailfrog 14y ago

Grunter owns Twitter

macarthy12 14y ago

I wonder if twitter have a $50 app.net account?

maxpow4h 14y ago

From here, I think we should move to a distributed model, like email and xmpp. It needs to be Open Source so anyone can run it and everyone owns their data. It needs to be compatible with current Twitter apps so all it requires is setting the API root. It needs to be distributed so anyone can follow anyone anywhere. There is no owner or root, there is no place to shut down. Proof of concept: https://nstatus.herokuapp.com https://nstatus.herokuapp.com Source: https://github.com/maxpow4h/nekomimi https://github.com/maxpow4h/nekomimi I wrote about the requirements of it here: http://maxpow4h.com/blog/twitter/ http://maxpow4h.com/blog/twitter/ edit: you can use any username with any password to sign in to nstatus. It then uses that password for your username. You can even do this from the official iOS Twitter app, just sign in.

Steko 14y ago
How do you control spam?
- maxpow4h 14y ago
  I don't, it's just a proof of concept. In the distributed implementation I would have a chain of trust from the people you follow, where if you report someone as a spammer, the server that represents people who follow you could look at your list and filter spammers based off this. You could also set the depth to traverse. There is a lot you could do with this. I'm not saying my implementation is right, but someone needs to do it. Tweeting is a type of communication and needs to be distributed.
seagreen 14y ago
What would its advantages be over status.net/identi.ca?
- maxpow4h 14y ago
  status.net is great, but I would have federation where you can add a server as a source rather than just a user. Then if that server has a @fred, @fred would always be resolved to the @fred on that server. In conflicts, you should be able to resolve these conflicts and proxy names yourself. (my proof of concept doesn't do this) Maybe even taking Diaspora and taking out everything except 140char status updates AND adding an API compatible with Twitter apps would be a better approach. edit: clarity to first sentence.

joering2 14y ago

Sometimes I tend to see the dark side of human in everything they do. Sorry, its just the way I am. I say when twitter was still this little chick, their approach was "we love all users, we welcome engineers; build amazing tools and surprise us!". I think the reason for that was to speed up the process of spreading the word - a simple fact that geek working on twitter 3rd party is still a human with plenty of friends to spread the word about twitter - so he can be helpful: let him spend his time doing what he likes doing the best - programming and he will become our cheap (free) PR tube. But now I bet most of a new age civilization knows or uses twitter. So it is time for a reality check: "fuck off of our platform; we don't need you anymore! You got all your friends to know twitter, some even addict to it; now stay away from trying to run your pathetic queries, using our own data stream". Just my version/2c. edit: my understanding is that Dorsey still has the most to say in the twitter world. With all its nastiness going on between twitter curtain, I say stay the hell far away from any startup he will do in the future. Sorry, but if he signs up half of the world on his square, what on Earth is stopping him from switching 2.5% to 10% fee?? nothing!! At least the past (present) shows he has the balls to execute moves that average tweeting Joe is not a fan of: shutting down 3rd parties, kicking out linkedin, shutting down instagram access, etc. Bottom line: stay away!

pedalpete 14y ago
Square doesn't have a network effect, it doesn't really matter if one store uses square, and the neighboring store uses google wallet, dwolla, or something else.
- natrius 14y ago
  Square and payment systems in general most certainly do have network effects. For instance, I don't have a Discover card because it's not worth the hassle of checking whether each merchant accepts it. Network effects are the lion's share of the justification behind Square's Starbucks deal.
- tnorthcutt 14y ago
  Yes it does. If their mobile payment app becomes the de facto standard, not accepting payment from that app could become as bad as not accepting credit cards.

mirkules 14y ago

If Twitter's business is threatened by third-party apps, why not charge for an API license? I also can't quite understand why developers expect a free API from services like Twitter and then complain when something changes? What is the business advantage of Twitter (or Facebook, or what-have-you) releasing a free, public API to anyone who asks, and how did they plan to monetize it when it got popular? You can't build your business model around "here, use my service for free" and not have a plan how to convert either the users of the 3rd party developers' software or the 3rd party developers themselves into paying customers (or monetize on that somehow, i.e. mining data, selling ads, etc). Maybe I'm just being naive -- I honestly don't have much experience dealing with these sorts of things, so I would love it if someone could break it down.

mark_l_watson 14y ago
I agree with you. Google's model is pretty good with most of their 25+ APIs having free tiers. Free is nice but being in a real business relationship feels better to me because it is more likely to be sustainable. Microsoft's API marketplace has the same solid sustainable feeling. If a business idea requires free use of other people's services then think of another idea.

shuzchen 14y ago

I wonder if this is coming because they can't keep up with the write load. The writes that come from these third party apps (that enable messaging multiple people, or queuing/delaying tweets) might throw a wrench in their system if it doesn't follow the natural usage they've designed it for. The only other reason I can fathom why they would doing this is they eventually intend to heavily push ads over their network, something that third party apps could interfere with.

ajanuary 14y ago
> I wonder if this is coming because they can't keep up with the write load. Wouldn't an easier solution for that be to tighten the rate limiting for posting? > The only other reason I can fathom why they would doing this is they eventually intend to heavily push ads over their network I think that's pretty much it.

ricardobeat 14y ago

> To prevent malicious use of the Twitter API and gain an understanding bla bla bla... Translation: so that we can charge even light API users. This will surely backfire - some services will switch from API usage to screen-scraping, resulting in an even higher load on twitter's servers.

virmundi 14y ago
At that point Twitter will simply block IP address, or some such. Sure there will be a game of catch me if you can, but the end is that no one really wins, and Twitter may suffer because people will use it to bad mouth Twitter. Enough user sentiment, even if it start from the devs of a few highly used apps, and Twitter might want to reconsider.
- bad_user 14y ago
  If the client is native, you can do that scrapping client side. Say your app has 10000 users. Assuming they can detect this (not likely) what are they gonna do? Block 10000 IPs?
- bad_user 14y ago
  If the client is native, you can do that scrapping client side. Say your app has 10000 users. Assuming they can detect this (not likely) what are they gonna do? Block 10000 IPs?

lukejduncan 14y ago

Best description of Klout I've seen to date: "utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense"

gcmartinelli 14y ago

I wonder how Twitter's developers are feeling about these changes... Devs tend to be pro-openess, I imagine this to have a bitter taste for most of them.

Sniffnoy 14y ago

People keep talking about Facebook and Myspace, but they lack(ed) full-on third-party clients, so what I'm wondering about is the LiveJournal comparison. LiveJournal too had and has third-party clients. And though hardly popular in the English-speaking world these days, it's still going. But I don't think it has similar guidelines. So what's the comparison?

taybin 14y ago

Has anyone considered that twitter is actually pretty stupid?

j45 14y ago

If I can't use Hootsuite, I can't use twitter.

robinwarren 14y ago
enterprise clients was one of the things in the 'good quadrants'. I'd assume hootsuite may well fit that description.
- j45 14y ago
  Hope so.. even if they have a high follower count

steele 14y ago

It's all utter vainglorious and masturbatory nonsense unless it's Apple's App Store "curation"

kintamanimatt 14y ago

Why wouldn't they just just charge heavy non-client API users and offer (cheap?) paid plans to users who want to use third party clients, leaving the rest to use an ad-supported web interface? This is the best solution long term which wouldn't really piss off anybody or nuke the ecosystem, while embracing the realities of running a business.

sdoering 14y ago

> So Klout, which is utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense, > that’s OK. But services like Storify and Favstar, which are > actually useful and/or fun, those are no good. Seconded. Just seconded. Know, why I keep using Twitter less and less...

dchest 14y ago

Did anyone manage to extract API key from the official Twitter client?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

robinwarren 14y ago

I don't really get the reaction here, and in general it feels like something of a mouth foaming rant rather than any reasonable discussion: >In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social analytics”, and “Social influence ranking” Some people believe those terms are bullshit, others less so. This argument looks more like shit slinging than anything else. > So Klout, which is utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense, that’s OK. Agreed, it is. Whilst correct, this doesn't prove a lot. I don't think the author is trying to claim they are allowed because they are 'vainglorious masturbatory nonsense', just pointing out that they are. If things you don't agree with can still exist after a new rule is enacted it doesn't make that rule wrong. If only things you don't like can exist because of that rule then maybe it's time to start worrying. > But services like Storify and Favstar, which are actually useful and/or fun, those are no good. I took a look at these. I'd personally disagree that they are useful or fun. Just my opinion. > And don’t even get me started on Twitter turning against client apps. For chrissake Twitter’s own app started life as a third-party client. And this means they should allow third-party clients forever? At a point in their development they obviously weren't putting as much effort into client apps as third-party developers. They decided to focus on that, made some purchases and now are focussing on it. This is part of the risk for third-party developers on any platform, a point which has been made here a number of times.

littlejim84 14y ago

Couldn't Twitter just arrange a price for "business" usage of their API? The main people getting affected by this are other clients or other intensive uses of their API, but those very people are most probably trying to make a profit themselves (HootSuite for example) so why not just charge for the API and so leave the restricted API for free use. Or am I missing the point?

throwa 14y ago

Developers seem to flock to platforms like Apple, Facebook and Twitter based on the fact that they have a large and growing user base without giving thought to this issue of commoditization of complements and how the ultimately destroy the business or livelihood of these developers. Most people building products or sharecropping on other people's platform never make meaningful income and yet those platform keep will prefer to announce large sums paid out to developers to encourage you to keep building complements. Apple will claim they paid out $5 billion but spread the numerous app developers it becomes peanut and not enough to pay their bills. They won't tell you that to pay out $5bn they made atleast $2billion based on their 30% cut. They don't tell you that iOS app success is a "lottery": 60% (or more) of developers don't break even http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lottery-and-60-of-developers-dont-break-even/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lo... http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-failing-like-its-1999/ http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-fail... I really hope people will think hard before building their business on the back of Apple, Facebook, Twitter or any such platform. You can use them as as distribution without being dependent on them and that is the way to go. Be your own bitch and not a Twitter, Apple or Facebook bitch: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bitch/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...

radarsat1 14y ago

Well it's not like alternatives don't exist. Of all the popular social media services, twitter has got to be one of the easiest to reimplement, it's only social inertia that keeps Twitter going. (Which says a lot about the power of social inertia.) As usual what is needed is a decentralized approach, but that always takes time to catch on even if it can be made to work.

Tichy 14y ago

Why couldn't Microblogging work like email (or Macroblogging)? Some people email through some provider or host their blogs at wordpress.com, others host their own. Big bloggers pay a lot for their infrastructure, amateuer bloggers get free blogs supported by ads. Still not sure if Twitter isn't just blogs that include a friends list and a reader (kind of like Tumblr, which seems to be taking off, too...). And the short messages.

thinkingisfun 14y ago
There is something like that, and it does work. But... does anyone know more sites that support OStatus? I know of these: http://rstat.us/ http://rstat.us/ http://identi.ca/ http://identi.ca/ http://status.net/ http://status.net/ Which is nice, but not really much. Wouldn't it also make sense for, say, Wordpress or phpBB (or any and all other blogging and forum software, these are just examples), to also support OStatus? Everything that has content and updates, basically. Why not build OStatus apps instead of Twitter apps? Am I missing something? Or are there other, similar standards/attempts? Because to be perfectly honest, I STILL haven't found the tutorial that just "tells me what to do" to go from offering an RSS feed to supporting OStatus, I'm kinda dense when it comes to these things. I need code examples :/ It can be pseudo-code, but it needs to be complete, instead of just a high-level verbal description ala "first you implement subhubbub, oh, and then there is salmon". I digress, but any and all hints would be appreciated. After all, it's for a good cause ^^

thirdsun 14y ago

I always had the impression that bands and musicians made myspace what it was. Seriously, they seemed to have every single band you could think of. That in combination with the Google Search results deal (which still seems to be running) was a winner.

countessa 14y ago

can't say I blame them really. They have a product, they have the infrastructure to support it....why shouldn't they have right of first refusal on how to monetize the thing? Seems to me that developers are getting all pissy because they can't have free reign to a platform that isn't even theirs. Perhaps, at the end of the day, Twitter doesn't care - they don't need the developers as early adopters anymore and it must be a fair old strain to keep the api infrastructure supporting them when the resources could be more profitably used building something else inside the company.

masklinn 14y ago

So from the "fantastic" quadrant scheme, basically they don't want users (which they re-labelled as consumers) to actually use (engage with) the service, instead they want: 1. "consumers" to be analyzed 2. Companies to use the service Well at least it's rather clear what the new and future values of Twitter are.

ajanuary 14y ago
It's not that they don't want users to engage with the service, it's that they want as much control over that interaction as they can possibly get away with. Cynically, the more garauntess they can give to the other three quadrants, the more money they can make from them. More positively, things like requiring reply/retweet/follow buttons with embedded content encourages more interaction with the service. If a (lazy) journalist makes up an article from collating a few tweets you're now encouraged to reply, retweet and interact with twitter right there rather than using the Facebook Connect comments system at the bottom of the page. Their value to the other three quadrants is interactions. They're not stupid enough to intentionally reduce that, though one could argue they're not going about it the best way.

nicholassmith 14y ago

I don't know if this is the worst thing that Twitter could have done, but it's probably fairly high up there. I wonder what people like Tapbot and thinking right now, they're grandfathered in for some very, very specific agreements but they know that one misstep and they'll end up out in the cold or paying a fortune. But then what does that mean for a Tweetbot user like myself? Less incremental updates? One day the application breaks? Who knows, too early to tell. I'm mostly surprised Twitter isn't just leveraging the fact they are pumping out that many requests and slipping ads or promoted tweets or promoted tweeters into the API stream and making cash off that. Seems like it'd make sense.

debacle 14y ago

Twitter are being shits, but as a developer on the Twitter platform, what could you really expect?

jcromartie 14y ago

Are people missing the fact that existing Twitter clients can keep their token allocation and double it? And new ones are limited to 100K only by default (they can ask for more)? Since when did people consider unlimited access to Twitter's API an unalienable right? It is their platform, and their API. It's also completely free. Twitter is absolutely free to limit usage of their own API however they wish. If it means they want to change the rate limiting on their servers, I see no problem with that.

dasil003 14y ago
No one is arguing they aren't in their rights to do this. I mean sure a lot of people are indignant about the fact that Twitter became what it was through the ingenuity of the developer community, and without them Twitter would never have grown to its current size, but that's neither here nor there. The bottom line is that Twitter's communications make it clear that they are grasping at straws for their profitability and that no developer is safe if they think you are capturing too much value. Obviously you always run a risk building on someone else's platform, but Twitter's direction and language around this would make any developer a fool to start anything new on that platform.
- jcromartie 14y ago
  But nothing, fundamentally, has changed. Twitter has always been grasping at straws for profitability, and they have always been in control of their platform. Would you have not been a fool to build something on Twitter last year? You would just be betting that they wouldn't introduce limits in the future, vs. knowing those limits today.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    Well it's been sort of clear which way the wind was blowing for a while now, but definitely 3 or 4 years ago Twitter was bursting at the seems with developer support for innovation in all directions. It was an extremely welcoming platform compared to Facebook and iOS. Their developer PR has completely reversed that. Of course if you're cynical you could have called it from the very beginning, but the point is it wasn't wholly unreasonable to believe that Twitter was willing to let developers capture real value in exchange for becoming gargantuan and providing critical infrastructure (ie. the old changing the world thing). Whereas now it's very very clear that Twitter is not willing to share any significant value. They want to capture it all, and they are adjusting the ToS to put them in a position to cut people off at the knees the minute they smell some value escaping from the ecosystem.

paulhauggis 14y ago

This is why I don't base my entire business on someone else's platform. They could make one little change and destroy your entire business overnight.

stephenlovell 14y ago

The large swath of discussion seems to be focusing on App Development, which is probably the hardest hit. However, there's another area that has gotten me wondering, non-app, non-client based websites using the API, in reference to the Display Guidelines..er Rules. This is the bit specifically. "Users must have a consistent experience wherever they interact with Tweets, whether on Twitter.com, a mobile client, website, or in an application developed with the Twitter API" So lets say that I go to GitHub and grab a little jQuery plugin to pull in my tweets on my personal portfolio. Does that also mean I have to make sure I include my own avatar, my username, Tweet actions, and twitter branding, among other things? What if those elements are unnecessary to the design or intention of what I'm doing on the site? And then there's the fact that all of these jQuery plugins are going to have to start implementing authenticated access (if they weren't already, which many seem to not be.) I don't have access to data on the matter, but I would surmise that there's a significant number of personal and portfolio sites out there pulling in tweets that are either not authenticated, or are modifying the tweet display in some way. All the ones I've interacted with have settings for turning avatar display on or off, or unlinking hash tags or links, etc. Thoughts?

codegeek 14y ago

Now I am convinced that I will never depend 100% on a third party platform/API for a serious business.

seanp2k2 14y ago

The reason: they found out that it's hard to make money when users can trivially strip out your ads.