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Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes
- andy_herbert 14y agoThe rules on displaying a tweet on a website seem so batshit insane I can only assume that my interpretation of it is wrong, and it should only apply to applications that provide the functionality of a Twitter client.
- jmillikin 14y agoRemember that these rules apply to users of the API; I don't think Twitter will come after you for block-quoting a tweet.
- mechanical_fish 14y agoWhere's the bright and shining line between a website and an application? If you've got any widget that uses the API the Tweets are going to have to conform, it would seem.
- untog 14y agoIn this case, it would appear that the line is "have you just copy and pasted the text of a tweet or are you getting it from the API?"
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoThey sound unenforceable to me. I'm pretty sure fair use dictates I can quote a person from Twitter without regard to their lame guidelines.
- darkstalker 14y agoI would use twitter web or the official apps if they clearly displayed the @username instead of the "real name". The latter is pretty much an useless field that only adds confusion. I just hope that the new display guidelines don't enforce displaying the real name over the username.
- cicloid 14y agoThis may be seen in the future as the big momement and somehow like a big favour for App.net current hype.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoThe problem is the teeming masses that are the ones creating all those nonsensical tweets that make Twitter so popular couldn't care less about these problems ...
- kylemaxwell 14y agoIf Twitter thinks I won't use <blockquote> to show a tweet when I want to, they're smoking something. That has to mean something else, right?
- alecperkins 14y agoMy interpretation is that it's referring to actually embedding a tweet in a way that pulls it live via the API (or otherwise presented as a tweet entity), and that just quoting someone's tweet (like one would quote an article) is still fine (how could it not be?). I could be wrong. These kinds of specific restrictions that aren't actually specific enough and really up to their whim are troubling. Twitter needs to be careful that their regulations don't become too much of a burden on their ecosystem. The vagueness and uncertainty of their rules is the problem.
- kylemaxwell 14y agoYeah, on second reading, I was totally wrong. I went and looked at the actual document (what a concept, heh) and they are specifically talking about using applications to display or embed tweets. I still don't think that's a great idea, but it concerns me a lot less.
- alecperkins 14y agoThat there's any confusion is why this is a problem. Once you start getting into centralized, micromanegerial control of the content of applications, you have to handle all the details, all the edge cases. Law has the same problem.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ricardobeat 14y agoApparently the new rules completely obliterate the just-launched branch.com. That's incredibly stupid.
- kunle 14y agoexplanation?
- ricardobeat 14y agoThey disallow interleaving tweets with custom actions/content, and display styles that deviate from the default.
- natrius 14y agoFrom my Branch usage, there's no interleaving at all. Am I missing something? Branch posts happen within Branch, not via tweets.
- ricardobeat 14y agoHmm... I don't know better since I haven't got my invite yet - I was under the impression that conversations were based on posts elsewhere (twitter etc).
- notatoad 14y agoWhat's incredibly stupid is starting a business that depends so heavily on a free third party API that it can be brought down by a rule change. Nobody is entitled to twitter's data except twitter.
- Silhouette 14y agoI just had a quick look at Twitter's terms, and it seems pretty clear that tweets are not Twitter's data. The copyright remains with the poster, and Twitter has a non-exclusive licence. So while I agree with your basic point that starting a business so completely dependent on something that could disappear overnight is probably unwise, it seems it's really only the API that is Twitter's, not the content itself. That could be a significant distinction, depending on how this all plays out.
- protomyth 14y agoDoes this kill Instagram on twitter?
- zdw 14y agoSo, what does this mean for CLI clients? I hardly ever use them, but things like Bitlbee or the ruby twitter gem are handy once in a while...
- gcr 14y agoI agree. Bitlbee is eons better than Twitter's official client in terms of accessibility for the visual impaired.
- politician 14y agoFrom Apple to Facebook to Twitter, are we learning that APIs and App Stores are simply traps wherein complements are commoditized so as to drive adoption and to explore (or ripoff) enhancements? These things seem to be win/win/win for the providers and angst/angst/angst for wannabe collaborators.
- look_lookatme 14y agoI think we are learning, given App.net isn't a closed, centralized system and can't dictate usage terms for users and developers at will.
- TimGebhardt 14y agoBut those contributors... they gave them $50 bucks. It should be whatever they think it should be!
- jmspring 14y agoApp.net is not centralized? Pretty sure it is. That said, Dalton has stated he intends to be more open than twitter/FB.
- brianshaler 14y agoWell then. If Dalton stated it, I'm sure it'll stay that way forever and he'll never change his mind. Let's give him money!
- dasil003 14y agoThere's a huge difference between founding a company on a vision of being a utility for developers and attempting to fulfill all the promise that Twitter had in the early days, versus the actual Twitter where they never really figured out what they were doing and scaled out to require such levels of investment that the grown ups inevitably moved in and started cannibalizing it for cash.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
- lukifer 14y agoQuestion: is there anything stopping an app from using an invisible embedded web view to pull content from Twitter, mimicking a plain browser, and then scraping the content from the DOM as a poor man's API? It would be tedious as hell, especially now that Twitter is all-Ajax-all-the-time, and it would be a moving target as they made changes, but could Twitter really do anything to stop it?
- poblano 14y agoI was going to ask that exact question. I think the answer is no, they can't stop you. And perhaps I'm being naïve, but it doesn't seem like it would be too terribly tedious if you used a scraping library, at least not for replacing basic API functions (i.e. getting a user's recent tweets). Obviously this would be limited to public tweets (no private tweets, no tweeting on the user's behalf, and no DMs).
- natrius 14y ago"Obviously this would be limited to public tweets (no private tweets, no tweeting on the user's behalf, and no DMs)." I don't think any of those limitations apply. If you can do something via a web browser, you can do it programmatically, depending on how much pain you're willing to endure.
- poblano 14y agoSorry, right -- I was just thinking of straight-up scraping of public pages. Asking for the user's password and logging in to do more scraping would probably be possible, but a lot more painful.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago> Question: is there anything stopping an app from using an invisible embedded web view to pull content from Twitter, mimicking a plain browser, and then scraping the content from the DOM as a poor man's API? Yes, it's called iframe busting. You can't force a page into an iframe that doesn't want to be there.
- akkartik 14y agoI find myself wondering: why the heck do I even have a twitter account? I hardly ever use it anyway. A political gesture is as good a reason as any to simplify my life. Turns out I need it for authenticating a couple of external sites. But its days are numbered..
- joewee 14y agoI can't understand how this affects companies like twitmusic.com which just closed a round from 500 startups. Or perhaps disqus.com which has a lot of integrations with twitter in their app. Can someone shed some light on this?
- imaginator 14y agoWow. This all seems very micro-manager-y. Now I'm curious how Twitter will respond: some open souce developers are working on integrating Twitter posts to buddycloud. That means Tweets will be displayed in a buddycloud channel. How exactly does twitter expect someone running a twitter-buddycloud gateway on their domain. Additionally buddycloud channels (containing tweets) can be displayed in a text client ala https://github.com/Schnouki/bccc#screenshot https://github.com/Schnouki/bccc#screenshot Are we expected to <blockquote> our VTs? :)
- rhizome 14y agoIf the hue and cry raises to a high enough level, they might back off a little. "Ask for twice what you want," etc.
- Kerrick 14y agoWhat does rule 5a, "Tweets that are grouped together into a timeline should not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other networks," mean for Gwibber and other desktop social clients?
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoIt means they're going to have to remove Twitter. Twitter doesn't want to be abstracted away as just another stream of messages.
- ojbyrne 14y agoGreat timing for app.net.