7 ms·

Completely agree with the main point... However, "Public APIs enable everyone to experiment with new ideas and create new ways of using your product. This is

by axod 18y ago

Completely agree with the main point... However, "Public APIs enable everyone to experiment with new ideas and create new ways of using your product. This is incredibly powerful because no matter how brilliant you and your coworkers are, there are always going to be smarter people outside of your company." The only thing that worries me about this, is that in Twitters case, they have lost control to a large extent. They're not really a destination anymore. They're a backend service with a free API. They're no longer the gatekeeper. Just suppose Twitter introduces some advert tweets in everyones stream. 3rd party apps could just ignore those. Suppose twitter does something else to try and monetize... The major twitter apps could just decide to get together and pass messages between themselves instead of through twitter. Having a public API is awesome for innovation and growing userbases, but it seems like there could be a reasonable risk and cost to that. I think a public API should not be so complete that people don't need to use your app anymore.

rokhayakebe 18y ago
Sorry but you are wrong. Twitter is Capitalism on the internet. It lets anyone compete and assumes the market will auto-regulate. Which is absolutely right. Although they let anyone use their API without much control, they know that if your app sucks, the market will not follow.
- axod 18y ago
  OK, So hypothetically... 1. I wait until there are some clear Twitter client winners. I'd expect the market will diverge on a Killer Twitter client for each platform. Perhaps there's some alternate web interfaces with killer features, such that people stop using twitter.com. 2. I buy those twitter clients. I now control maybe 80% of the twitter client world. 3. I stop using twitter.com API as the backend, and replace it with my own. 4. Twitter.com becomes pretty much moot. Maybe it's far fetched, maybe it's not... Alternatively, 1. Wait until 3rd party twitter clients account for a large amount of twitter traffic - say 80%. 2. Do a deal between all the 3rd party twitter clients to stop using twitter, and collaborate on an alternate backend.
  - omouse 18y ago
    Hypothetically?? This can already happen! Check out identi.ca. It uses Laconica http://laconi.ca/trac/ http://laconi.ca/trac/ which is "a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk." I'm surprised no one has taken steps to avoid relying on Twitter.
    - axod 18y ago
      Sure, I mean hypothetically in terms of actually displacing Twitters market dominance :) I think if Twitter put a step wrong, or start to try and monetize users, we may see some changes :/
  - rokhayakebe 18y ago
    2. I buy those twitter clients. I now control maybe 80% of the twitter client world. Give me an example of one person or several people who came together and bought 80% of clients built around a successful API and then controlled that market?
wheels 18y ago
There's definitely a cost-benefit scenario, but I think in Twitter's case much of their run-away usage has been because exactly that ecosystem exists. It's like an early adopter's wet dream. My biggest gripe with it is the rate limiting since it means I can't actually build the apps that I want to. (I'd love to build a friend-finder for it. Theirs sucks. That's a perfect setup for our graph discovery stuff, but we need to be able to traverse several levels out to do something useful with it.)
- arockwell 18y ago
  Off-topic, but I did see a pretty good friend finder linked to on hacker news the other day. Can't remember the name of it though.
  - wheels 18y ago
    Hmm, if you stumble across it let me know. If you've build some secondary app that people are using you can probably get away with scraping out bits of the graph along the way, but most of the ones I've seen just do some very simple counting of friends rather than trying to do anything like finding clusters or trying to figure out which of them you're not likely to already know about.
    - unalone 18y ago
      http://www.whoshouldifollow.com/ http://www.whoshouldifollow.com/ Think this is the one he was talking about.
      - arockwell 18y ago
        Yes, that was the one. I thought it gave pretty good recommendations.
        wheels 18y ago
        Yep, they're pretty good. I'll probably play with it a little more later to figure out what the rough weights on correlation are.

by axod 18y ago

rokhayakebe 18y ago

Sorry but you are wrong. Twitter is Capitalism on the internet. It lets anyone compete and assumes the market will auto-regulate. Which is absolutely right. Although they let anyone use their API without much control, they know that if your app sucks, the market will not follow.

axod 18y ago
OK, So hypothetically... 1. I wait until there are some clear Twitter client winners. I'd expect the market will diverge on a Killer Twitter client for each platform. Perhaps there's some alternate web interfaces with killer features, such that people stop using twitter.com. 2. I buy those twitter clients. I now control maybe 80% of the twitter client world. 3. I stop using twitter.com API as the backend, and replace it with my own. 4. Twitter.com becomes pretty much moot. Maybe it's far fetched, maybe it's not... Alternatively, 1. Wait until 3rd party twitter clients account for a large amount of twitter traffic - say 80%. 2. Do a deal between all the 3rd party twitter clients to stop using twitter, and collaborate on an alternate backend.
- omouse 18y ago
  Hypothetically?? This can already happen! Check out identi.ca. It uses Laconica http://laconi.ca/trac/ http://laconi.ca/trac/ which is "a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short (140 character) messages over the Web. Users can choose which people to "follow" and receive only their friends' or colleagues' status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk." I'm surprised no one has taken steps to avoid relying on Twitter.
  - axod 18y ago
    Sure, I mean hypothetically in terms of actually displacing Twitters market dominance :) I think if Twitter put a step wrong, or start to try and monetize users, we may see some changes :/
- rokhayakebe 18y ago
  2. I buy those twitter clients. I now control maybe 80% of the twitter client world. Give me an example of one person or several people who came together and bought 80% of clients built around a successful API and then controlled that market?

wheels 18y ago

There's definitely a cost-benefit scenario, but I think in Twitter's case much of their run-away usage has been because exactly that ecosystem exists. It's like an early adopter's wet dream. My biggest gripe with it is the rate limiting since it means I can't actually build the apps that I want to. (I'd love to build a friend-finder for it. Theirs sucks. That's a perfect setup for our graph discovery stuff, but we need to be able to traverse several levels out to do something useful with it.)

arockwell 18y ago
Off-topic, but I did see a pretty good friend finder linked to on hacker news the other day. Can't remember the name of it though.
- wheels 18y ago
  Hmm, if you stumble across it let me know. If you've build some secondary app that people are using you can probably get away with scraping out bits of the graph along the way, but most of the ones I've seen just do some very simple counting of friends rather than trying to do anything like finding clusters or trying to figure out which of them you're not likely to already know about.
  - unalone 18y ago
    http://www.whoshouldifollow.com/ http://www.whoshouldifollow.com/ Think this is the one he was talking about.
    - arockwell 18y ago
      Yes, that was the one. I thought it gave pretty good recommendations.
      - wheels 18y ago
        Yep, they're pretty good. I'll probably play with it a little more later to figure out what the rough weights on correlation are.