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What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

511 points by DaNmarner 14y ago

Pewpewarrows 14y ago
If my salary depended on the Twitter API right now I'd be scared shitless.
- hnriot 14y ago
  Unless you work for Twitter, I'd say you're right, and rightly so. Don't depend on someone else's API, how many times must history repeat itself before this message sinks in.
  - barrkel 14y ago
    That's a ridiculous statement. Unless you are as vertically integrated as Apple, you can't avoid dependencies on someone else's APIs.
    - bobzimuta 14y ago
      What's ridiculous is assuming you can make money off of a free data source without any inherent long term risk.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    That's an unreasonable position to take. Almost all third-party software products ever created rely on some other third-party APIs, and to suggest "Don't depend on someone else's API" as a strategy would be akin to saying "Don't write software for a living." The challenge is to determine, in advance, if the platform you are writing for will maintain some reasonable level of access to the API, both now, and in the future.
    - wccrawford 14y ago
      Perhaps "don't depend on someone else's API unless you're paying for it" is a better attitude. Depending on someone else to keep giving you something for free is problematic at best.
      - ghshephard 14y ago
        That's not correct either. There are lots of free APIs that are reliably stable, available, and profitable. Think about how many tens of billions of dollars have been made writing to the win32 API. Likewise, the community of GNU/Linux APIs (Perhaps the first time I've ever felt it was appropriate to write GNU/Linux in a sentence :-) - glibc, etc... The question you have to ask yourself is how much leverage the third-party has over you if they decided they want to screw you over. Even still, you may want to write for that platform if the $$$ is there. Look at iOS platform - Apple totally owns you. Or, even better, look at the PS3/Wii/XBox platforms - the owners of those APIs have even more control over what you can do - but still very profitable platforms to develop for. At the end of the day, a judgement call has to be made. No easy rules.
    - javajosh 14y ago
      >Almost all third-party software products ever created rely on some other third-party APIs This is evidence for an unfortunate confusion about the usage of the term "API". There is a world of difference between a third-party library and a third-party service, each of which can be said to have an API. There are plenty of pieces of software which rely on one kind of API but not the other. It is entirely possible to write software that doesn't rely on a third-party service. If that's the point you're trying to make then great! You see the thing is about relying on third-party services is that a great amount of trust must exist between the application and the service. It's a good way to go, but when there's no actual money moving between the app and the service, everyone has reason to be a little concerned.
  - Skroob 14y ago
    Better advice would be: Don't depend on someone else's API when they've made it quite clear how hostile they're going to be towards you.
  - arscan 14y ago
    Don't rely on someone else's API? That's like going through life never trusting anybody. Sure, you'll avoid getting burned, but I hardly think that's an optimal strategy. A better strategy is to trust somebody (/an API) until they give you good reasons not to. Admittedly, twitter seems to have broken that trust. I personally would't use them as a platform, unless the benefits clearly outweigh the risks of them haphazardly cutting me off.
    - jcromartie 14y ago
      How about "don't build your business on a free service's platform".
      - arscan 14y ago
        Free? Free to whom? Twitter charges some users, but doesn't charge others. The same could be said about just about every platform out there. I don't think that's particularly useful advice, because I don't know what you mean by free (is Android free? what about network tv? what about the road systems?).
        dchuk 14y ago
        Twitter's API is free for API consumers...
        jcromartie 14y ago
        I mean a platform where the vast majority of users don't pay to use it. Why would Twitter be happy to engineer and support an API for Twitter client apps if it means they can't reach those users the way they need to to generate revenue?
- jcromartie 14y ago
  If your salary ever depends on a completely free service's API, then you may be scared shitless, but you've also usually made a bad choice.
  - robryan 14y ago
    Unfortunately they don't give you the option to pay to get around it though.
ishansharma 14y ago
This is really idiotic. What are they trying to do? Make sure that all the top users flock to App.net or somewhere else?
- JohnTHaller 14y ago
  Considering that I don't know a single real-life person that is on app.net, I wouldn't consider it an alternative to anything.
  - swombat 14y ago
    The same used to be true of Twitter.
    - snowwrestler 14y ago
      Yes but early-days Twitter did not have to compete with current-day Twitter when it was trying to grow.
      - anu_gupta 14y ago
        It had to compete with general ignorance of its value. Many would argue that's a more difficult hurdle.
  - ishansharma 14y ago
    I know quite a bit of people and common thing between all of them is that they are quite influential. They have been irritated by things like this. And they may convince others to join App.net. Granted that many people will avoid App.net just because you have to pay for it and common internet guy will never realize what Twitter is doing. Still, if even top 10-20% of people who I follow go to App.net, I will follow!
- benatkin 14y ago
  app.net is still laughable as a replacement for twitter. With the new apps it's now convenient to use a feed aggregation service that only accepts feeds from rich people, but it's still a feed aggregation service that only accepts feeds from rich people.
smirksirlot 14y ago
I think some people might call this "biting the hand that feeds you". Or at least the hand that got you started.
- mattdeboard 14y ago
  Others might call it "getting big-timed"
taude 14y ago
While I've disagreed a lot with a lot of Marco's blog posts, gotta say he's totally right on this one. Actually this is bigger than Twitter, as any new platform that comes out that wants Devs to develop for their API needs to be treated with a certain cynicism: if the platform gets big enough, they'll likely cut you out. I wonder if this trend between FB, Twitter, etc. is going to ruin the ability for new companies and new platforms to attract free development by third parties?
JohnTHaller 14y ago
If you build a company around someone else's free API, you're either a high stakes gambler or a moron.
- bryanlarsen 14y ago
  Or out for a quick buck without any expectation to build a lasting business.
  - mattdeboard 14y ago
    How does this hold up when you're talking about web development, especially javascript-heavy or -only applications? You live and die by the browser API don't you?
    - pessimizer 14y ago
      Don't develop for the quirks of any particular browser.
      - mattdeboard 14y ago
        Except for when the browsers implement standards differently, e.g. appcache, localstorage, etc.
        pavel_lishin 14y ago
        I didn't know that different browsers implemented those things differently, aside from the default and maximum amount of space given to localstorage.
- noinput 14y ago
  just like anyone who had apps using Tumblr's v1 API which they terminated quicker than anyone could hear about it's demise
hnriot 14y ago
*The effective rule, therefore, is even simpler: “Don’t build anything for Twitter.” Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have. What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do. I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's perfectly reasonable of them to not make any special exemption. If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter then they'd likely give you a higher limit, but that's not the case...
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  > Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have. The message they want you to have is "build boring enterprisey stuff".
- sandis 14y ago
  > What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? Notifications. Multiple accounts. Filters. Speed. Twitter.com compares to (many) Twitter clients like 2004 webmail compares to native e-mail clients of the time.
  - objclxt 14y ago
    Not just that: if you're using a Windows 8 tablet like the Surface (I appreciate I might be the only person doing so - it feels like that sometimes!) the Twitter web client is a terrible experience. Because Twitter provides native clients for Android and iOS tablets their web site is simply not optimised for touch. It's crappy on Windows 8, plain and simple.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  > What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do. Native > Web, if you do it right. Web has a lot of UX limitations native apps don't have.
quotemstr 14y ago
You know, back before APIs were all the rage, people wrote clients for web services by scraping. Twitter really wouldn't be able to do anything about a Twitter client that pretended to be IE9.
- artursapek 14y ago
  I've had a bot blocked by Myspace when I resorted to that. They started redirecting all my requests to " http://google.com http://google.com ". And I was just working on an old Thinkpad running Ubuntu server in my dorm room, so I have to think blocking me was an automated response. I'm sure Twitter knows how to block crawlers, especially ones that they're actually aware of.
  - quotemstr 14y ago
    I'm sure Twitter would block bots doing unuserlike things. But isn't the point of a Twitter client to do userlike things?
    - artursapek 14y ago
      I suppose, and I suppose if the client used a user's IP they couldn't block them the same way. But wouldn't a client that scrapes the full HTML to get the data you want be horribly inefficient, and hard to maintain? API's are all the rage because they give you just what you want. Think about bandwidth.
      - wccrawford 14y ago
        Having written scrapers in the past, I can tell you that changes are usually pretty easy to deal with. And if you write your scraper nicely, many small changes won't even matter. Since the client runs on the user's machine, performance isn't really an issue, either. (Trying to do it for all users on a server is a different story.) APIs are indeed "all the rage" because they're easier and don't change as much. But when given no other option... You do what you have to.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
It is surprising that their response does not include a call to action with respect to their business development team. Why isn't there a 'click here to sign up to by a 10,000,000 token' link in that email? Now granted the result might be the same, people not developing for their API but at least they could get value pricing information as part of the transaction.
lancewiggs 14y ago
It's so sad to watch such a lively lovely service remove the fun by destroying the values that made it great. Meanwhile we are sitting here saying "charge us money, you fools", and they are deaf to us. Twitter: your online site is usability hell, your own clients are dated and painful. Above all we have one question: why? Why are you intent on this path of foolishness based on placing customers and developers last?
- Skroob 14y ago
  Because their customers are advertisers, and their users are people who follow Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber. It's not the same service as it was when it started, when the API was important to them.
  - wmf 14y ago
    If Twitter charged to send tweets (like Facebook is now doing) then they wouldn't need to crack down on third-party clients.
    - Skroob 14y ago
      But who wants to pay to tweet? With the business and culture they've built, they don't have a way to go back. They have to stay free for everyone, they have to show ads to make money, and they have to kill 3rd party apps to make sure the ads get seen their way. If you want Twitter-that-was, ADN is your best bet at this point.
    - nollidge 14y ago
      > If Twitter charged to send tweets (like Facebook is now doing) How's that working out for Facebook?
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
Not exactly. Twitter doesn't want you to build anything that will take a single eyeball from them. There are still services that can be built that don't fall in that category, though, such as sentiment analysis. At least, for now. Twitter has shown they are willing to be hostile towards their developers. Even if I fit in the "don't take their eyeballs" category, I wouldn't build on their platform because I don't trust them.
rubynerd 14y ago
I agree with the "Don't build anything for twitter" motto (and it would look good on a t-shirt), but part of me wonders if twitter could get by charging 25 cents a token past 100k, so developing apps is still possible, and twitter still gets its slice of the pie. Although, it still kills the advertising cash cow.
- fbuilesv 14y ago
  I've always wondered why Twitter doesn't do something like this. Why wouldn't they change their rules to something like: Once you have more than 100k users you pay us 5-10% of every copy of your software sold. If your app's free then you don't pay anything. I'm pretty sure developers would agree to something like this and Twitter could get some extra money that they're not getting right now.
  - pteredactyl 14y ago
    Yea, that's not a bad idea. But who knows what their actual revenue or capital situation is. Just like Facebook, transparency is an issue. I participate in these services, but I know full well whatever I post is market research.
uptown 14y ago
Aside from pissing off Twitter, and possibly getting a cease and desist, what's preventing developers from building a translator that sits between Twitter's web layer and their native application client? Couldn't something be developed that loads Twitter into a hidden webview that's locally scraped for the purpose of re-display however the developer pleases on their client? This implementation wouldn't require the tokens, and wouldn't be constrained by their arbitrary limits. But I suppose they'd just wind up getting sued.
- tiles 14y ago
  Or automating the creation of a unique app token for each user: https://dev.twitter.com/apps https://dev.twitter.com/apps What TOS does that violate? What if the user manually creates a token and inputs it? Could Twitter detect this even happening?
  - xentronium 14y ago
    I'd say that sudden explosion in one user application is very suspicious. This is easily countered by premoderation of applications, for example.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- zmmmmm 14y ago
  > But I suppose they'd just wind up getting sued You answered your own question. People seem to be under the impression that just because something is accessible with a web browser it no longer falls under copyright and you can use it how you want. This has never been true. Any web site can make a terms of use (and most do) that prohibit you scraping their data.
  - uptown 14y ago
    So what about user style-sheets? They modify the appearance of the data, but I've never seen anyone sued over it. Nobody sues IE for rendering HTML differently. In this case it'd just be another 'browser'.
droithomme 14y ago
> Now we know: “work with us directly” means “die”. Very good summary by Marco. It's really annoying when these companies have secret policies that have to be discovered rather than are clearly stated. It just wastes people's time to try to discover the policy, having to do costly time consuming experiments to find out what the policy is as if this was an unknown branch of particle physics.
TheCapn 14y ago
This is the inherent problem with building your product with dependencies on other products. You are tied to their system in such a way that your existence relies on the faith that they keep doing what they do and do not change to a system that blocks you or inhibits your functions. I see the need/desire for hackers to make things useful and unique in a way that they envision things but you will never hear me apologize for my remarks on this subject. If you are building your business or product depending on someone else's and are not a form of contractual partner you can be kicked in the ass down the line and there's no accountability to you they owe.
jusben1369 14y ago
I've watched this from a distance with interest. Developers have a special place within the overall Internet ecosystem. As a non developer, everything Twitter has said and done in the last 12 months or more tells me "We don't need a healthy 3rd party ecosystem and we don't want one. Hobbysits can stay filling odd niche requirements and here's our cap. Everyone else though? Sorry" I have no emotion around this as I'm not a developer. I feel as though many developers can't wrap their mind around this concept of not being wanted. They're used to being very wanted initially and then at best still wanted but with a few controlling parameters around activity (see "all App Store/Developer discussions"). I suspect it might be a slightly over exaggerated sense of self importance that's meant it's taken a long time for the obvious to set in. Perhaps that's why Marco only just connected the dots? (as usual I'm not talking about all developers - I've seen many who got it right from the get go)
- batgaijin 14y ago
  well it's not like twitter benefits from correcting that.
- jbail 14y ago
  I think "over exaggerated sense of self importance" is far from the crux of this issue. Developers are pissed off at Twitter for two main reasons: 1) Developers helped build Twitter as it exists today. With their hard work, sleepless nights and toil, they created the ecosystem that allowed Twitter to grow into the giant they are today. Now that Twitter is big, they are saying thank you by more or less shutting down their API for any serious Twitter integrations. 2) Twitter said, "we'll work with you" regarding API limits, but they didn't mean it. People that built things in good faith are now realizing that Twitter didn't act as such. If you put a lot of effort into building an app that utilizes Twitter's API, you'd be rightly pissed about this too. I agree that it may have taken a long time for "the obvious" to set in with regards to Twitter not caring about their 3rd party developer ecosystem. Hopefully, as the OP points out, its pretty obvious you'd be a fool to build anything on Twitter anymore.
  - ableal 14y ago
    > Developers helped build Twitter There were warnings about the fate of sharecroppers well before Twitter existed: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla... Quote: "It’s a lousy position to be in, because you’re never going to make much, and if the land’s owner finds something better to do with the land, you’re history."
koide 14y ago
I wonder why something like "If you want more than 100k usernames, either pay us $x per username or use our advertisement API and put whatever tweets/ads we push where we tell you to" is not an option. It would be refreshingly honest and for some people/clients it could work, plus it could earn them some of the needed cash.
- tinco 14y ago
  This doesn't work for them because Twitter has had 1.16 billion dollars in funding. Getting money from teeny little twitter apps is not the sort of plan they are going to make that money back with. Imagine if they charged a buck per username per year. This would probably be enough money to put tweetro out of business (say 100k dollar per year), but it would not come close to the amount of money they need to make. Even if something makes you good money, often you have to scrap it if it isn't or even endangers your core product.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    It would work if their goal was to gently discourage developers writing client apps without totally cutting them off; an economic disincentive. But it doesn't make sense to do that, and they don't want to anyway.
  - koide 14y ago
    True, you'd be left with "do the app like we tell you to" option, like offering an API where's mandatory to show the sponsored content in specific, Twitter approved ways. It would probably be a nightmare to implement well. A pity.
rsaarelm 14y ago
I liked the Internet better when we had things like irc and news to talk with that weren't controlled by any single corporate entity.
crististm 14y ago
I don't understand why people bend over backward and provide also the grease to FB, Tweeter, AppStore & co?
nollidge 14y ago
Sort of amused by the wording in this line: > It does not appear that your service addresses an area that our current or future products do not already serve. How can your future product already serve an area?
- jbenz 14y ago
  Shouldn't the real news today be that Twitter has invented time travel?
- cbr 14y ago
  If it's in development and not released yet.
jmilloy 14y ago
Twitter: Don't build core-feature Twitter clients, we probably won't approve them. Atta: I built a core-feature Twitter client! Twitter: Sorry, we're not approving your core-feature Twitter client. Who is surprised? How is this news? Were you expecting them to not apply their own rules? It seems like a clear-cut case, and concluding "don't build anything for Twitter" is just throwing a temper tantrum.
- pdenya 14y ago
  I don't know if anyone is surprised by the response as much as disappointed. I've seen the news that twitter is limiting api clients but I haven't seen news of them denying someone who reached that limit more keys. I clicked this wondering what was going to happen with Tweetbot for mac when it hits the same limit and now I know. Maybe the "Don't build anything for Twitter" thing is a little heavy handed but the fact remains that if you build something that you hoping will get more than 100k users you can't count on twitter as a stable platform.
  - Argorak 14y ago
    Its not heavy-handed. Twitter has shown repeatedly that they have no problem with: a) changing the rules of the game and b) leaving you in the dark of what the actual rules _are_ Make business with people that care about your business. Twitter clearly doesn't.
    - nicholassmith 14y ago
      Twitter was quite happy to sit and watch as people built fantastic services and tools on the service that without a doubt increased engagement, then sort of went "oh shit we need to make some money" and proceeded to piss on the bonfire 3rd party developers have created. It's even handed for Twitter and heavy handed for people that expect rationality from a company.
      - blibble 14y ago
        they're acting perfectly rationally: they see third party clients as a threat to their ability to monetise, so they're killing them why anyone would expect a business to do anything else is beyond my understanding!
keithpeter 14y ago
When you have to find 1500 monthly pay checks, I suppose you have to get the money somehow. http://bijansabet.com/post/35849228202/the-first-photo-the-twitter-team-prior-to-our http://bijansabet.com/post/35849228202/the-first-photo-the-t... Found via http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/november/howTechCompaniesGrow http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/november/howTechCompanies... Seems a sensible position to me (old guy, non-coder and won't use twitter or fb).
ianstallings 14y ago
Wait, you mean you can't just wrap someone's service in a fancy UI and then sell it as your own? OH THE HUMANITY! What happened to innovation? All I see these days is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. Hell even the memes these days are derived from other memes.
- schiffern 14y ago
  >just wrap someone's service in a fancy UI I thought we got over the "no value in UIs" bias when Apple made more money than some small countries. >then sell it as your own 1) Tweetro doesn't say "look at this great real-time messaging service we made!" They built a UI. That's their value proposition. 2) Less importantly, Tweetro is free. >All I see these days is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. How is that uniquely "these days"?
jeremysmyth 14y ago
Now that it has the userbase, it's milking its situation. The talk in the beginning was "How are they gonna make money out of this?" and the answer is gradually unfolding. Kudos to them or starting the way they did, shame on them for closing out the very things that brought them to where they are. Late arrivals like identi.ca might not be as polished, but they offer a similar product, with open APIs. Being based on open and federated standards like status.net, it's extremely unlikely that identi.ca will ever get the ego trip twitter got, and in fact is much more likely that it will be more open over time, and more useful even if other competition arises. What it doesn't have, and what we (consumers as well as devs) can help with, is by heading over there and giving them users and status and content.
yaix 14y ago
> that our [...] future products do not already serve wat?
zaidf 14y ago
The problem with core-twitter limitation is that twitter's own product sucks and has basic features missing or implemented very poorly...years after launch. This is just shitty all around. Sometimes I wish I could buy 1,000 twitter tokens for some price and use it in some "core-feature" 3rd party app because twitter sucks at implementing the very core features.
javajosh 14y ago
Goddamn, I've never seen a clearer example of the colloquial term "butt hurt". Twitter is a company, they built something, they support it, they have the right to control it, and they have arbitrary rights over it. More tellingly, they have a very good point. It reminds me of the craigslist haters, and my response to them. I don't hate craigslist for stopping third parties from using their data because, frankly, it hurts their brand if "druggycriminalroommates.com" starts syndicating their apartment ads. That said, don't think that I'm some sort of right-wing capitalist fascist. No, I don't think everything should be privately owned and controlled. There are some things that should remain public: internet infrastructure being one of them. My personal belief is that the only real egalitarian, open system is one that relies on that infrastructure, and ONLY on that infrastructure. This vision requires that people either a) run their own servers, or b) pay money to someone else to run servers (or parts of servers). (Other possibilities for payment exist, of course, such as bartering information for service, etc.) I mean, twitter is free to control, the OP is free to complain about that control, but the solution presented (don't develop anything for twitter) is ridiculous and immature.
- chipotle_coyote 14y ago
  A company builds an API and encourages lots of developers to use it across a wide variety of projects, and they do. After achieving almost unprecedented success in user adoption, the company decides to unilaterally change their terms to say, "From this day on, not only do we want you to use our API only in ways that drive value to us, we're not really down with you getting any value in return beyond whatever value being able to say 'you can post to Twitter from our app!' brings you." And they are really down with screwing over existing developers to bring them in line with the New Reality. I'm pretty sure that I would, at that point, not be keen on developing anything that used that API, even if it complied with the new rules, because the company has at that point demonstrated that they will knife me in the back if they think it's going to further their own business goals. How is that reaction ridiculous and immature on my part?
  - javajosh 14y ago
    I don't know, I think it's stupid to allow any private company to control the worlds data, as Twitter, Facebook, and to some extent Google are attempting to do. To expect these for-profit companies to act in any way other than "unilaterally" is naive. If you think that they violated the terms of service, then you should sue them for fraud - or if that's too expensive, make it clear that you think they are engaging in fraud. Actually my message is this: build for the open web, and only the open web! There is a lot of room in that space. Personally, I think that Twitter will go bye bye and Facebook is going to get eroded by it. But that's my personal belief.
k-mcgrady 14y ago
I still don't understand why everyone is getting angry about this. It doesn't affect clients made before they introduced the new rule. The only people who get hurt are the idiots who ignore twitter and build a business which uses their API in a way they have said not to.
camus 14y ago
make the twitter api a paid api, and everything will be clearer. Businesses that rely on twitter will have a contractual relationship with twitter , meaning less uncertainty ,less competition ( since you'll have to pay upfront to access twitter's data , less clients ). That's the solution that makes sense , instead of this half baked situation twitter api developers are in.
fidz 14y ago
If developers are prohibited to develop apps with Twitter APIs, so why they build the API?
kalleboo 14y ago
I'd like to see what would happen if a third-party client just started to use the API token extracted from the official client. What could they do?
- vonuebelgarten 14y ago
  Technically nothing, I think. It will be nice to see clients with an option "Use you own tokens" and the official client token widely available for use. For instance, I'm thinking about this for my integrations -- that's a token Twitter will never ban or throttle.
dpeck 14y ago
I'm amazed we haven't seen some developer say screw it and build thing using Twitters own keys. There have been multiple instances of them being published over the last couple of years, and I'm having trouble seeing what incentive a dev has not to just use them. If you're working against Twitters interest already then why not go for broke?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
babesh 14y ago
How would you compare the Twitter ecosystem to how the Facebook ecosystem is doing lately? Seems that Facebook sign on/identity is doing well. Seems that the Facebook hosted apps are increasingly less relevant than apps just getting sign on and possibly newsfeed flow? Twitter ecosystem seems pretty much destroyed. Tweeting and Facebook newsfeed seem to be doing fine.
TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned yet that Windows 8 has built-in Twitter integration that works very well. Why do you need another client? Just go to the People Hub and click What's new. Need to reply or retweet? The buttons are right below the message. Need to see mentions or replies? Click Notifications.
why-el 14y ago
Does anybody know of any Facebook apps that sort of do the same thing, i.e. recreate the Facebook newsfeed experience for users?
- xuki 14y ago
  Shameless plug: http://picaapp.com http://picaapp.com. There are a few things we can't do due to the API not available for 3rd party apps
  - why-el 14y ago
    Oh you guys are doing great work. I had a similar idea for a long time now, so its good to see it executed. :) Quick question: Does the API allow you to do interesting things with the newsfeed elements like tags and saving/searching?
nileshbhojani 14y ago
Tweetro should be happy that Twitter is not blaming them for using their platform in a way they prohibit. They want to use what Twitter has worked hard to build, make easy money, and then also want Twitter to spend extra to help them do it (by allowing more API calls etc) - why don't they build something original?
LiveFanChat 14y ago
In other words: “Even though we don’t currently have a Windows 8 client, we might have one in the future, so yours isn’t allowed.” http://www.marco.org/2012/11/16/twitter-being-a-dick-again http://www.marco.org/2012/11/16/twitter-being-a-dick-again I think its time that we the users took this up with the VC’s who have invested in Twitter and start putting pressure on them. Anyone have access to the current cap table?
myWordBiLLY 14y ago
So, based on their guideline, if we made and sold Twitter ID BiLLYS which are custom made wooden signs for the or office (and BTW makes for a cool present), would Twitter have a problem with this?
marblar 14y ago
It seems to me this is an issue of pricing. Reach 100,000 tokens with demand to spare? Congratulations, you left money on the table. Charge more next time.

511 points by DaNmarner 14y ago

Pewpewarrows 14y ago

If my salary depended on the Twitter API right now I'd be scared shitless.

hnriot 14y ago
Unless you work for Twitter, I'd say you're right, and rightly so. Don't depend on someone else's API, how many times must history repeat itself before this message sinks in.
- barrkel 14y ago
  That's a ridiculous statement. Unless you are as vertically integrated as Apple, you can't avoid dependencies on someone else's APIs.
  - bobzimuta 14y ago
    What's ridiculous is assuming you can make money off of a free data source without any inherent long term risk.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  That's an unreasonable position to take. Almost all third-party software products ever created rely on some other third-party APIs, and to suggest "Don't depend on someone else's API" as a strategy would be akin to saying "Don't write software for a living." The challenge is to determine, in advance, if the platform you are writing for will maintain some reasonable level of access to the API, both now, and in the future.
  - wccrawford 14y ago
    Perhaps "don't depend on someone else's API unless you're paying for it" is a better attitude. Depending on someone else to keep giving you something for free is problematic at best.
    - ghshephard 14y ago
      That's not correct either. There are lots of free APIs that are reliably stable, available, and profitable. Think about how many tens of billions of dollars have been made writing to the win32 API. Likewise, the community of GNU/Linux APIs (Perhaps the first time I've ever felt it was appropriate to write GNU/Linux in a sentence :-) - glibc, etc... The question you have to ask yourself is how much leverage the third-party has over you if they decided they want to screw you over. Even still, you may want to write for that platform if the $$$ is there. Look at iOS platform - Apple totally owns you. Or, even better, look at the PS3/Wii/XBox platforms - the owners of those APIs have even more control over what you can do - but still very profitable platforms to develop for. At the end of the day, a judgement call has to be made. No easy rules.
  - javajosh 14y ago
    >Almost all third-party software products ever created rely on some other third-party APIs This is evidence for an unfortunate confusion about the usage of the term "API". There is a world of difference between a third-party library and a third-party service, each of which can be said to have an API. There are plenty of pieces of software which rely on one kind of API but not the other. It is entirely possible to write software that doesn't rely on a third-party service. If that's the point you're trying to make then great! You see the thing is about relying on third-party services is that a great amount of trust must exist between the application and the service. It's a good way to go, but when there's no actual money moving between the app and the service, everyone has reason to be a little concerned.
- Skroob 14y ago
  Better advice would be: Don't depend on someone else's API when they've made it quite clear how hostile they're going to be towards you.
- arscan 14y ago
  Don't rely on someone else's API? That's like going through life never trusting anybody. Sure, you'll avoid getting burned, but I hardly think that's an optimal strategy. A better strategy is to trust somebody (/an API) until they give you good reasons not to. Admittedly, twitter seems to have broken that trust. I personally would't use them as a platform, unless the benefits clearly outweigh the risks of them haphazardly cutting me off.
  - jcromartie 14y ago
    How about "don't build your business on a free service's platform".
    - arscan 14y ago
      Free? Free to whom? Twitter charges some users, but doesn't charge others. The same could be said about just about every platform out there. I don't think that's particularly useful advice, because I don't know what you mean by free (is Android free? what about network tv? what about the road systems?).
      - dchuk 14y ago
        Twitter's API is free for API consumers...
      - jcromartie 14y ago
        I mean a platform where the vast majority of users don't pay to use it. Why would Twitter be happy to engineer and support an API for Twitter client apps if it means they can't reach those users the way they need to to generate revenue?
jcromartie 14y ago
If your salary ever depends on a completely free service's API, then you may be scared shitless, but you've also usually made a bad choice.
- robryan 14y ago
  Unfortunately they don't give you the option to pay to get around it though.

ishansharma 14y ago

This is really idiotic. What are they trying to do? Make sure that all the top users flock to App.net or somewhere else?

JohnTHaller 14y ago
Considering that I don't know a single real-life person that is on app.net, I wouldn't consider it an alternative to anything.
- swombat 14y ago
  The same used to be true of Twitter.
  - snowwrestler 14y ago
    Yes but early-days Twitter did not have to compete with current-day Twitter when it was trying to grow.
    - anu_gupta 14y ago
      It had to compete with general ignorance of its value. Many would argue that's a more difficult hurdle.
- ishansharma 14y ago
  I know quite a bit of people and common thing between all of them is that they are quite influential. They have been irritated by things like this. And they may convince others to join App.net. Granted that many people will avoid App.net just because you have to pay for it and common internet guy will never realize what Twitter is doing. Still, if even top 10-20% of people who I follow go to App.net, I will follow!
benatkin 14y ago
app.net is still laughable as a replacement for twitter. With the new apps it's now convenient to use a feed aggregation service that only accepts feeds from rich people, but it's still a feed aggregation service that only accepts feeds from rich people.

smirksirlot 14y ago

I think some people might call this "biting the hand that feeds you". Or at least the hand that got you started.

mattdeboard 14y ago
Others might call it "getting big-timed"

taude 14y ago

While I've disagreed a lot with a lot of Marco's blog posts, gotta say he's totally right on this one. Actually this is bigger than Twitter, as any new platform that comes out that wants Devs to develop for their API needs to be treated with a certain cynicism: if the platform gets big enough, they'll likely cut you out. I wonder if this trend between FB, Twitter, etc. is going to ruin the ability for new companies and new platforms to attract free development by third parties?

JohnTHaller 14y ago

If you build a company around someone else's free API, you're either a high stakes gambler or a moron.

bryanlarsen 14y ago
Or out for a quick buck without any expectation to build a lasting business.
- mattdeboard 14y ago
  How does this hold up when you're talking about web development, especially javascript-heavy or -only applications? You live and die by the browser API don't you?
  - pessimizer 14y ago
    Don't develop for the quirks of any particular browser.
    - mattdeboard 14y ago
      Except for when the browsers implement standards differently, e.g. appcache, localstorage, etc.
      - pavel_lishin 14y ago
        I didn't know that different browsers implemented those things differently, aside from the default and maximum amount of space given to localstorage.
noinput 14y ago
just like anyone who had apps using Tumblr's v1 API which they terminated quicker than anyone could hear about it's demise

hnriot 14y ago

*The effective rule, therefore, is even simpler: “Don’t build anything for Twitter.” Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have. What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do. I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's perfectly reasonable of them to not make any special exemption. If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter then they'd likely give you a higher limit, but that's not the case...

MatthewPhillips 14y ago
> Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have. The message they want you to have is "build boring enterprisey stuff".
sandis 14y ago
> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? Notifications. Multiple accounts. Filters. Speed. Twitter.com compares to (many) Twitter clients like 2004 webmail compares to native e-mail clients of the time.
- objclxt 14y ago
  Not just that: if you're using a Windows 8 tablet like the Surface (I appreciate I might be the only person doing so - it feels like that sometimes!) the Twitter web client is a terrible experience. Because Twitter provides native clients for Android and iOS tablets their web site is simply not optimised for touch. It's crappy on Windows 8, plain and simple.
TeMPOraL 14y ago
> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do. Native > Web, if you do it right. Web has a lot of UX limitations native apps don't have.

quotemstr 14y ago

You know, back before APIs were all the rage, people wrote clients for web services by scraping. Twitter really wouldn't be able to do anything about a Twitter client that pretended to be IE9.

artursapek 14y ago
I've had a bot blocked by Myspace when I resorted to that. They started redirecting all my requests to " http://google.com http://google.com ". And I was just working on an old Thinkpad running Ubuntu server in my dorm room, so I have to think blocking me was an automated response. I'm sure Twitter knows how to block crawlers, especially ones that they're actually aware of.
- quotemstr 14y ago
  I'm sure Twitter would block bots doing unuserlike things. But isn't the point of a Twitter client to do userlike things?
  - artursapek 14y ago
    I suppose, and I suppose if the client used a user's IP they couldn't block them the same way. But wouldn't a client that scrapes the full HTML to get the data you want be horribly inefficient, and hard to maintain? API's are all the rage because they give you just what you want. Think about bandwidth.
    - wccrawford 14y ago
      Having written scrapers in the past, I can tell you that changes are usually pretty easy to deal with. And if you write your scraper nicely, many small changes won't even matter. Since the client runs on the user's machine, performance isn't really an issue, either. (Trying to do it for all users on a server is a different story.) APIs are indeed "all the rage" because they're easier and don't change as much. But when given no other option... You do what you have to.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

It is surprising that their response does not include a call to action with respect to their business development team. Why isn't there a 'click here to sign up to by a 10,000,000 token' link in that email? Now granted the result might be the same, people not developing for their API but at least they could get value pricing information as part of the transaction.

lancewiggs 14y ago

It's so sad to watch such a lively lovely service remove the fun by destroying the values that made it great. Meanwhile we are sitting here saying "charge us money, you fools", and they are deaf to us. Twitter: your online site is usability hell, your own clients are dated and painful. Above all we have one question: why? Why are you intent on this path of foolishness based on placing customers and developers last?

Skroob 14y ago
Because their customers are advertisers, and their users are people who follow Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber. It's not the same service as it was when it started, when the API was important to them.
- wmf 14y ago
  If Twitter charged to send tweets (like Facebook is now doing) then they wouldn't need to crack down on third-party clients.
  - Skroob 14y ago
    But who wants to pay to tweet? With the business and culture they've built, they don't have a way to go back. They have to stay free for everyone, they have to show ads to make money, and they have to kill 3rd party apps to make sure the ads get seen their way. If you want Twitter-that-was, ADN is your best bet at this point.
  - nollidge 14y ago
    > If Twitter charged to send tweets (like Facebook is now doing) How's that working out for Facebook?

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

Not exactly. Twitter doesn't want you to build anything that will take a single eyeball from them. There are still services that can be built that don't fall in that category, though, such as sentiment analysis. At least, for now. Twitter has shown they are willing to be hostile towards their developers. Even if I fit in the "don't take their eyeballs" category, I wouldn't build on their platform because I don't trust them.

rubynerd 14y ago

I agree with the "Don't build anything for twitter" motto (and it would look good on a t-shirt), but part of me wonders if twitter could get by charging 25 cents a token past 100k, so developing apps is still possible, and twitter still gets its slice of the pie. Although, it still kills the advertising cash cow.

fbuilesv 14y ago
I've always wondered why Twitter doesn't do something like this. Why wouldn't they change their rules to something like: Once you have more than 100k users you pay us 5-10% of every copy of your software sold. If your app's free then you don't pay anything. I'm pretty sure developers would agree to something like this and Twitter could get some extra money that they're not getting right now.
- pteredactyl 14y ago
  Yea, that's not a bad idea. But who knows what their actual revenue or capital situation is. Just like Facebook, transparency is an issue. I participate in these services, but I know full well whatever I post is market research.

uptown 14y ago

Aside from pissing off Twitter, and possibly getting a cease and desist, what's preventing developers from building a translator that sits between Twitter's web layer and their native application client? Couldn't something be developed that loads Twitter into a hidden webview that's locally scraped for the purpose of re-display however the developer pleases on their client? This implementation wouldn't require the tokens, and wouldn't be constrained by their arbitrary limits. But I suppose they'd just wind up getting sued.

tiles 14y ago
Or automating the creation of a unique app token for each user: https://dev.twitter.com/apps https://dev.twitter.com/apps What TOS does that violate? What if the user manually creates a token and inputs it? Could Twitter detect this even happening?
- xentronium 14y ago
  I'd say that sudden explosion in one user application is very suspicious. This is easily countered by premoderation of applications, for example.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
zmmmmm 14y ago
> But I suppose they'd just wind up getting sued You answered your own question. People seem to be under the impression that just because something is accessible with a web browser it no longer falls under copyright and you can use it how you want. This has never been true. Any web site can make a terms of use (and most do) that prohibit you scraping their data.
- uptown 14y ago
  So what about user style-sheets? They modify the appearance of the data, but I've never seen anyone sued over it. Nobody sues IE for rendering HTML differently. In this case it'd just be another 'browser'.

droithomme 14y ago

> Now we know: “work with us directly” means “die”. Very good summary by Marco. It's really annoying when these companies have secret policies that have to be discovered rather than are clearly stated. It just wastes people's time to try to discover the policy, having to do costly time consuming experiments to find out what the policy is as if this was an unknown branch of particle physics.

TheCapn 14y ago

This is the inherent problem with building your product with dependencies on other products. You are tied to their system in such a way that your existence relies on the faith that they keep doing what they do and do not change to a system that blocks you or inhibits your functions. I see the need/desire for hackers to make things useful and unique in a way that they envision things but you will never hear me apologize for my remarks on this subject. If you are building your business or product depending on someone else's and are not a form of contractual partner you can be kicked in the ass down the line and there's no accountability to you they owe.

jusben1369 14y ago

I've watched this from a distance with interest. Developers have a special place within the overall Internet ecosystem. As a non developer, everything Twitter has said and done in the last 12 months or more tells me "We don't need a healthy 3rd party ecosystem and we don't want one. Hobbysits can stay filling odd niche requirements and here's our cap. Everyone else though? Sorry" I have no emotion around this as I'm not a developer. I feel as though many developers can't wrap their mind around this concept of not being wanted. They're used to being very wanted initially and then at best still wanted but with a few controlling parameters around activity (see "all App Store/Developer discussions"). I suspect it might be a slightly over exaggerated sense of self importance that's meant it's taken a long time for the obvious to set in. Perhaps that's why Marco only just connected the dots? (as usual I'm not talking about all developers - I've seen many who got it right from the get go)

batgaijin 14y ago
well it's not like twitter benefits from correcting that.
jbail 14y ago
I think "over exaggerated sense of self importance" is far from the crux of this issue. Developers are pissed off at Twitter for two main reasons: 1) Developers helped build Twitter as it exists today. With their hard work, sleepless nights and toil, they created the ecosystem that allowed Twitter to grow into the giant they are today. Now that Twitter is big, they are saying thank you by more or less shutting down their API for any serious Twitter integrations. 2) Twitter said, "we'll work with you" regarding API limits, but they didn't mean it. People that built things in good faith are now realizing that Twitter didn't act as such. If you put a lot of effort into building an app that utilizes Twitter's API, you'd be rightly pissed about this too. I agree that it may have taken a long time for "the obvious" to set in with regards to Twitter not caring about their 3rd party developer ecosystem. Hopefully, as the OP points out, its pretty obvious you'd be a fool to build anything on Twitter anymore.
- ableal 14y ago
  > Developers helped build Twitter There were warnings about the fate of sharecroppers well before Twitter existed: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla... Quote: "It’s a lousy position to be in, because you’re never going to make much, and if the land’s owner finds something better to do with the land, you’re history."

koide 14y ago

I wonder why something like "If you want more than 100k usernames, either pay us $x per username or use our advertisement API and put whatever tweets/ads we push where we tell you to" is not an option. It would be refreshingly honest and for some people/clients it could work, plus it could earn them some of the needed cash.

tinco 14y ago
This doesn't work for them because Twitter has had 1.16 billion dollars in funding. Getting money from teeny little twitter apps is not the sort of plan they are going to make that money back with. Imagine if they charged a buck per username per year. This would probably be enough money to put tweetro out of business (say 100k dollar per year), but it would not come close to the amount of money they need to make. Even if something makes you good money, often you have to scrap it if it isn't or even endangers your core product.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  It would work if their goal was to gently discourage developers writing client apps without totally cutting them off; an economic disincentive. But it doesn't make sense to do that, and they don't want to anyway.
- koide 14y ago
  True, you'd be left with "do the app like we tell you to" option, like offering an API where's mandatory to show the sponsored content in specific, Twitter approved ways. It would probably be a nightmare to implement well. A pity.

rsaarelm 14y ago

I liked the Internet better when we had things like irc and news to talk with that weren't controlled by any single corporate entity.

crististm 14y ago

I don't understand why people bend over backward and provide also the grease to FB, Tweeter, AppStore & co?

nollidge 14y ago

Sort of amused by the wording in this line: > It does not appear that your service addresses an area that our current or future products do not already serve. How can your future product already serve an area?

jbenz 14y ago
Shouldn't the real news today be that Twitter has invented time travel?
cbr 14y ago
If it's in development and not released yet.

jmilloy 14y ago

Twitter: Don't build core-feature Twitter clients, we probably won't approve them. Atta: I built a core-feature Twitter client! Twitter: Sorry, we're not approving your core-feature Twitter client. Who is surprised? How is this news? Were you expecting them to not apply their own rules? It seems like a clear-cut case, and concluding "don't build anything for Twitter" is just throwing a temper tantrum.

pdenya 14y ago
I don't know if anyone is surprised by the response as much as disappointed. I've seen the news that twitter is limiting api clients but I haven't seen news of them denying someone who reached that limit more keys. I clicked this wondering what was going to happen with Tweetbot for mac when it hits the same limit and now I know. Maybe the "Don't build anything for Twitter" thing is a little heavy handed but the fact remains that if you build something that you hoping will get more than 100k users you can't count on twitter as a stable platform.
- Argorak 14y ago
  Its not heavy-handed. Twitter has shown repeatedly that they have no problem with: a) changing the rules of the game and b) leaving you in the dark of what the actual rules _are_ Make business with people that care about your business. Twitter clearly doesn't.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    Twitter was quite happy to sit and watch as people built fantastic services and tools on the service that without a doubt increased engagement, then sort of went "oh shit we need to make some money" and proceeded to piss on the bonfire 3rd party developers have created. It's even handed for Twitter and heavy handed for people that expect rationality from a company.
    - blibble 14y ago
      they're acting perfectly rationally: they see third party clients as a threat to their ability to monetise, so they're killing them why anyone would expect a business to do anything else is beyond my understanding!

keithpeter 14y ago

When you have to find 1500 monthly pay checks, I suppose you have to get the money somehow. http://bijansabet.com/post/35849228202/the-first-photo-the-twitter-team-prior-to-our http://bijansabet.com/post/35849228202/the-first-photo-the-t... Found via http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/november/howTechCompaniesGrow http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/november/howTechCompanies... Seems a sensible position to me (old guy, non-coder and won't use twitter or fb).

ianstallings 14y ago

Wait, you mean you can't just wrap someone's service in a fancy UI and then sell it as your own? OH THE HUMANITY! What happened to innovation? All I see these days is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. Hell even the memes these days are derived from other memes.

schiffern 14y ago
>just wrap someone's service in a fancy UI I thought we got over the "no value in UIs" bias when Apple made more money than some small countries. >then sell it as your own 1) Tweetro doesn't say "look at this great real-time messaging service we made!" They built a UI. That's their value proposition. 2) Less importantly, Tweetro is free. >All I see these days is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. How is that uniquely "these days"?

jeremysmyth 14y ago

Now that it has the userbase, it's milking its situation. The talk in the beginning was "How are they gonna make money out of this?" and the answer is gradually unfolding. Kudos to them or starting the way they did, shame on them for closing out the very things that brought them to where they are. Late arrivals like identi.ca might not be as polished, but they offer a similar product, with open APIs. Being based on open and federated standards like status.net, it's extremely unlikely that identi.ca will ever get the ego trip twitter got, and in fact is much more likely that it will be more open over time, and more useful even if other competition arises. What it doesn't have, and what we (consumers as well as devs) can help with, is by heading over there and giving them users and status and content.

yaix 14y ago

> that our [...] future products do not already serve wat?

zaidf 14y ago

The problem with core-twitter limitation is that twitter's own product sucks and has basic features missing or implemented very poorly...years after launch. This is just shitty all around. Sometimes I wish I could buy 1,000 twitter tokens for some price and use it in some "core-feature" 3rd party app because twitter sucks at implementing the very core features.

javajosh 14y ago

Goddamn, I've never seen a clearer example of the colloquial term "butt hurt". Twitter is a company, they built something, they support it, they have the right to control it, and they have arbitrary rights over it. More tellingly, they have a very good point. It reminds me of the craigslist haters, and my response to them. I don't hate craigslist for stopping third parties from using their data because, frankly, it hurts their brand if "druggycriminalroommates.com" starts syndicating their apartment ads. That said, don't think that I'm some sort of right-wing capitalist fascist. No, I don't think everything should be privately owned and controlled. There are some things that should remain public: internet infrastructure being one of them. My personal belief is that the only real egalitarian, open system is one that relies on that infrastructure, and ONLY on that infrastructure. This vision requires that people either a) run their own servers, or b) pay money to someone else to run servers (or parts of servers). (Other possibilities for payment exist, of course, such as bartering information for service, etc.) I mean, twitter is free to control, the OP is free to complain about that control, but the solution presented (don't develop anything for twitter) is ridiculous and immature.

chipotle_coyote 14y ago
A company builds an API and encourages lots of developers to use it across a wide variety of projects, and they do. After achieving almost unprecedented success in user adoption, the company decides to unilaterally change their terms to say, "From this day on, not only do we want you to use our API only in ways that drive value to us, we're not really down with you getting any value in return beyond whatever value being able to say 'you can post to Twitter from our app!' brings you." And they are really down with screwing over existing developers to bring them in line with the New Reality. I'm pretty sure that I would, at that point, not be keen on developing anything that used that API, even if it complied with the new rules, because the company has at that point demonstrated that they will knife me in the back if they think it's going to further their own business goals. How is that reaction ridiculous and immature on my part?
- javajosh 14y ago
  I don't know, I think it's stupid to allow any private company to control the worlds data, as Twitter, Facebook, and to some extent Google are attempting to do. To expect these for-profit companies to act in any way other than "unilaterally" is naive. If you think that they violated the terms of service, then you should sue them for fraud - or if that's too expensive, make it clear that you think they are engaging in fraud. Actually my message is this: build for the open web, and only the open web! There is a lot of room in that space. Personally, I think that Twitter will go bye bye and Facebook is going to get eroded by it. But that's my personal belief.

k-mcgrady 14y ago

I still don't understand why everyone is getting angry about this. It doesn't affect clients made before they introduced the new rule. The only people who get hurt are the idiots who ignore twitter and build a business which uses their API in a way they have said not to.

camus 14y ago

make the twitter api a paid api, and everything will be clearer. Businesses that rely on twitter will have a contractual relationship with twitter , meaning less uncertainty ,less competition ( since you'll have to pay upfront to access twitter's data , less clients ). That's the solution that makes sense , instead of this half baked situation twitter api developers are in.

fidz 14y ago

If developers are prohibited to develop apps with Twitter APIs, so why they build the API?

kalleboo 14y ago

I'd like to see what would happen if a third-party client just started to use the API token extracted from the official client. What could they do?

vonuebelgarten 14y ago
Technically nothing, I think. It will be nice to see clients with an option "Use you own tokens" and the official client token widely available for use. For instance, I'm thinking about this for my integrations -- that's a token Twitter will never ban or throttle.

dpeck 14y ago

I'm amazed we haven't seen some developer say screw it and build thing using Twitters own keys. There have been multiple instances of them being published over the last couple of years, and I'm having trouble seeing what incentive a dev has not to just use them. If you're working against Twitters interest already then why not go for broke?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

babesh 14y ago

How would you compare the Twitter ecosystem to how the Facebook ecosystem is doing lately? Seems that Facebook sign on/identity is doing well. Seems that the Facebook hosted apps are increasingly less relevant than apps just getting sign on and possibly newsfeed flow? Twitter ecosystem seems pretty much destroyed. Tweeting and Facebook newsfeed seem to be doing fine.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned yet that Windows 8 has built-in Twitter integration that works very well. Why do you need another client? Just go to the People Hub and click What's new. Need to reply or retweet? The buttons are right below the message. Need to see mentions or replies? Click Notifications.

why-el 14y ago

Does anybody know of any Facebook apps that sort of do the same thing, i.e. recreate the Facebook newsfeed experience for users?

xuki 14y ago
Shameless plug: http://picaapp.com http://picaapp.com. There are a few things we can't do due to the API not available for 3rd party apps
- why-el 14y ago
  Oh you guys are doing great work. I had a similar idea for a long time now, so its good to see it executed. :) Quick question: Does the API allow you to do interesting things with the newsfeed elements like tags and saving/searching?

nileshbhojani 14y ago

Tweetro should be happy that Twitter is not blaming them for using their platform in a way they prohibit. They want to use what Twitter has worked hard to build, make easy money, and then also want Twitter to spend extra to help them do it (by allowing more API calls etc) - why don't they build something original?

LiveFanChat 14y ago

In other words: “Even though we don’t currently have a Windows 8 client, we might have one in the future, so yours isn’t allowed.” http://www.marco.org/2012/11/16/twitter-being-a-dick-again http://www.marco.org/2012/11/16/twitter-being-a-dick-again I think its time that we the users took this up with the VC’s who have invested in Twitter and start putting pressure on them. Anyone have access to the current cap table?

myWordBiLLY 14y ago

So, based on their guideline, if we made and sold Twitter ID BiLLYS which are custom made wooden signs for the or office (and BTW makes for a cool present), would Twitter have a problem with this?

marblar 14y ago

It seems to me this is an issue of pricing. Reach 100,000 tokens with demand to spare? Congratulations, you left money on the table. Charge more next time.