10 ms·

Twitter Gave Meerkat Two Hours’ Notice before Cutting Access

177 points by byoogle 12y ago

beastman82 12y ago
The original author included a misplaced modifier "only." Despite their poor grammar it should have been included here.
fsniper 12y ago
"I get it that when you own the house, you own the rules," Rubin says. "You can say, I’m about to launch my own app, and I don’t want you to have the graph. But I think the two hours was a little aggressive and not working toward building a community." A little bit spot on. This is some kind of bullying.
- madsravn 12y ago
  "We are not naïve, we knew it was coming," Rubin tells Fast Company. "We thought that we would at least get a week notice—a fair game" He knew it was coming, he knew it was wrong. Why would he need more warning than two hours? Why even a warning?
  - StavrosK 12y ago
    Nothing indicates that he knew it was "wrong", only that Twitter won't like it.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Among many problems: when applications exploit Twitter metadata to send unwanted unsolicited messages, that makes users far less willing to authenticate other apps to Twitter. I'm already paranoid about doing that (and Facebook authentication), because who knows how the app will choose to embarrass me?
      - comex 12y ago
        Yet somehow I think promising not to spam again would not provide a path towards regaining access, post Periscope.
        minimaxir 12y ago
        The bigger issue is that if there was no punishment, everyone else would now be trying to use the same tactics Meerkat did in order to spam people and obtain growth, which does result in a negative Twitter experience in the long run. Startups will probably still try to do it anyways, though.
    - madsravn 12y ago
      potato potato
      - pessimizer 12y ago
        You were also upvoted.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
scrumfailz 12y ago
But the folks here at HN still love Twatter? Right? I mean, Twatter - go Twatter! Or maybe not. Maybe the rest of the readers realise Twatter is doomed long term with no viable business model beyond annoying it's already dwindling user base?
tptacek 12y ago
The backstory here is that Meerkat downloaded users Twitter friend lists (or "the Twitter social graph") and used it directly to send unsolicited messages to them? If so: burn them with fire.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Meerkat legitimately broke Twitter rules with their autotweeting of replies to in-app comments without consent: https://support.twitter.com/articles/76915-automation-rules-and-best-practices https://support.twitter.com/articles/76915-automation-rules-... > "The @reply and Mention functions are intended to make communication between users easier, and automating these processes in order to reach many users is considered an abuse of the feature. If you are automatically sending @reply messages or Mentions to many users, the recipients must request or approve this action in advance. For example, sending automated @replies based on keyword searches is not permitted. Users should also have an easy way to opt-out of your service (in addition to the requirement that all users must opt-in before receiving the messages)" Although this behavior is still in the app I believe. Regardless, this, along with the [LIVE NOW] spam, has resulted in me unfollowing/muting everyone who uses Meerkat on Twitter, which has significantly reduced the effectiveness of Twitter for me, and which is why I think Twitter is in the right for wanting to restrict content.
  - gojomo 12y ago
    Meerkat makes it fairly clear that "everything that happens on Meerkat also happens on Twitter" – and the comments on a stream only go to Twitter as replies to the original invite tweet. That's not 'automatically… to many users" but specifically to those viewing a thread, and only when individual users compose individual replies. It's not a clear violation of the quoted policy… if at all. And as you note, that's not the behavior Twitter has started.
    - minimaxir 12y ago
      > That's not 'automatically… to many users" but specifically to those viewing a thread, and only when individual users compose individual replies. Correct, but due to the Twitter mechanic where replies are shown in your feed if you are following both people (which was the case for me as the initial users are techies), it can still be a mess.
rdl 12y ago
I wonder if they strategically waited to do this at SXSW, or if they just saw abuse reach a critical point.
- mhomde 12y ago
  Only if they strategically wanted to market Meerkat :) I had never heard of it before and doubt I would have if it wasn't for this debacle
- jusben1369 12y ago
  I believe they did it _prior_ to SXSW. That's the type of event that could 10x awareness for Merkat and thus complaints when they cut it off. I have no inside knowledge but have heard it said by others they jumped on it due to SXSW.
comex 12y ago
As much as Meerkat's spam tactics downgrade my level of sympathy, I still think this is pretty awful behavior on Twitter's part. The list of people I follow is, essentially, personal information about me and them, contributed by me. I shouldn't be prevented from accessing my own information with the app or service of my choice; it shouldn't be part of a corporate fiefdom. Still waiting for the first attempt to test the legal waters on scraping Twitter.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  In fairness, Twitter's API endpoints for accessing followers/following have fair rate limits. (75k follower Twitter IDs every 15 minutes) https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/friends/ids https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/friends/ids This is probably the only fair endpoint that Twitter has in terms of rate limiting. Getting that scale of information via conventional scraping would be infeasable.
- sehugg 12y ago
  I don't think Twitter has anything against scraping lists of followers of public accounts -- after all, that's available to everyone. (One exception I think is geolocation data which can't be stored.) It's then using that information to spam Twitter itself that's the problem. Facebook, OTOH, has pretty much turned off access to the friends graph for apps other than games.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
steven2012 12y ago
Anyone who builds applications built on Twitter's or Facebook's APIs deserves whatever treatment they get. I've never seen companies that treats their API partners with as much disdain as those two companies.
rodgerd 12y ago
> the Meerkat app will no longer be able to automatically push notifications that announce the live event to all of a Meerkater's Twitter followers. Good. If "people I interact with twitter autospamming me every time they use an unrelated service" becomes A Thing then I might as well not use twitter.
- jusben1369 12y ago
  But how is this different to that person firing off a Tweet?
  - gfosco 12y ago
    There would be some content in the tweet, instead of an almost-assuredly dead link.
paulhauggis 12y ago
If you are going to use Twitter to grow your business, at least be a little smarter about it. There are plenty of other ways to get yourself out there over Twitter without spamming users.
- jusben1369 12y ago
  Well in all fairness it seems like they're growing their business like crazy but pre and post access.
tehwebguy 12y ago
In case you are wondering what Meerkat actually did via Twitter's API: - Auto-follow @appmeerkat on twitter when you sign up - Auto-enable push notifications for @appmeerkat's tweets when you sign up - Auto-tweet when you schedule a stream - Auto-tweet when you start streaming - Auto-tweet when you comment on a stream This is the entire disclosure they offered: "Everything that happens on Meerkat happens on Twitter"
- coryl 12y ago
  How did they manage to do this? Aren't there proper permissions requests like Facebook?
  - tehwebguy 12y ago
    Twitter has two primary methods of authenticating API access: 1. Web version - typical Facebook style, describes specific permissions but there are only 2 options that devs can use: read or read/write (plus read/write + direct messages but that will be gone this year) 2. iOS version - menu slides in with all of your system authorized twitter accounts, you tap the one you want I'm pretty positive #2 does not give you any real authorization messages or screens. I just logged out of Meerkat to find out but that screen doesn't work anymore because their keys are broken
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Yeah the real question is why they got a phone call with any heads-up, instead of immediate account revocation.
  - izacus 12y ago
    I don't know, maybe because warning a company / person that they're doing something you don't like and giving them the chance to fix it is decent behavior? Or did we remove the concept of decency from our business vocabularies already?
    - MichaelGG 12y ago
bobbytherobot 12y ago
Not that I care for what Meerkat was doing, but isn't this sort of a selling point of Fabric?
sehugg 12y ago
No one likes spam, but invitation channels are certainly drying up. I sometimes wonder how fast Facebook would have grown if email spam filtering in 2004 was as aggressive as it is today, especially considering that its early growth was among .edu addresses. (Remember that this was back before Gmail and often your email client did the bulk of spam detection, if not all .. though my memory is a little rusty)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jim_greco 12y ago
It's a cool app, but there's been a huge degradation of my stream now that it's littered with |LIVE NOW| posts and out-of-context replies. Neither of which is fixed by this unfortunately.
fapjacks 12y ago
Really, at this point, I think you're certifiably retarded if you build a business even tangentially relying on Twitter or Facebook. This is exactly why people stopped doing it years ago. Why is this surprising to anyone?
- supercoder 12y ago
  They aren't locked in to Twitter, they've just used it to jump start their growth. Can't argue it hasn't worked well for them with a lot of influential voice talking about the app. Not to say it will succeed in the long run, but in this case they could have done a lot worse.
inthewoods 12y ago
A counter argument: Uber breaks rules, a large number of people have no issue with it and consider it fighting an unfair regulatory system. These guys break the rules on Twitter and everyone sides with Twitter. Now, I'm on the side of Twitter in this one, but I think it's an interesting thought experiment. To me the difference is that they ended up bothering Twitter's users (as seen by the comments on this thread), whereas Uber just bothered cab drivers, cab company owners and medallion holders - a relatively small audience that has pissed off a lot people. There's also the issue of whether Twitter has a monopoly in the same sense that the cab companies do.
- pbreit 12y ago
  Because Meerkat made Twitter noticeably worse. All its notifications are useless in a matter of seconds or minutes (vs revolutionizing transportation to tremendous citizen delight).
  - inthewoods 12y ago
    Yes, but imagine if you owned a cab company in NYC or SF - how would you be feeling?
    - marincounty 12y ago
      Or, you buy the Uber Driver pitch and buy a Uber approved 4 door car, and find you are working for less than minimum wage, or worse yet; you end up in Bankruptcy court? I don't care that Uber is providing competition--I just don't like their business plan of hiring Drivers without any risk on their part. "Oh, but you're an Independent Contractor, but you need to drive a certain year four door car from our List.(A list that doesn't make a lot of sense? Oh yea, I have found selling a four door car on the secondary market is harder than selling a two door car; if your Uber job is not what they claimed?" My point is I guess Uber provides great service for their customers, but I question the great experience for the "Independent Contractors"? Sorry, but I saw Uber and had to chime in. Back on track--Twitter--that verification email I keep forgetting to fill out.
ykumar6 12y ago
I'm surprised they even got a notice
SG- 12y ago
I don't quite get why it matters if he got 2 hours or a week. Was he going to build a Twitter clone in that time?
bobofettfett 12y ago
And it has nothing to do with Periscope.
marketcalls 12y ago
So Now the Meerkat's awesome feature soon to get replicate by twitter itself?

177 points by byoogle 12y ago

The original author included a misplaced modifier "only." Despite their poor grammar it should have been included here.

"I get it that when you own the house, you own the rules," Rubin says. "You can say, I’m about to launch my own app, and I don’t want you to have the graph. But I think the two hours was a little aggressive and not working toward building a community." A little bit spot on. This is some kind of bullying.

madsravn 12y ago
"We are not naïve, we knew it was coming," Rubin tells Fast Company. "We thought that we would at least get a week notice—a fair game" He knew it was coming, he knew it was wrong. Why would he need more warning than two hours? Why even a warning?
- StavrosK 12y ago
  Nothing indicates that he knew it was "wrong", only that Twitter won't like it.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Among many problems: when applications exploit Twitter metadata to send unwanted unsolicited messages, that makes users far less willing to authenticate other apps to Twitter. I'm already paranoid about doing that (and Facebook authentication), because who knows how the app will choose to embarrass me?
    - comex 12y ago
      Yet somehow I think promising not to spam again would not provide a path towards regaining access, post Periscope.
      - minimaxir 12y ago
        The bigger issue is that if there was no punishment, everyone else would now be trying to use the same tactics Meerkat did in order to spam people and obtain growth, which does result in a negative Twitter experience in the long run. Startups will probably still try to do it anyways, though.
  - madsravn 12y ago
    potato potato
    - pessimizer 12y ago
      You were also upvoted.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

scrumfailz 12y ago

But the folks here at HN still love Twatter? Right? I mean, Twatter - go Twatter! Or maybe not. Maybe the rest of the readers realise Twatter is doomed long term with no viable business model beyond annoying it's already dwindling user base?

tptacek 12y ago

The backstory here is that Meerkat downloaded users Twitter friend lists (or "the Twitter social graph") and used it directly to send unsolicited messages to them? If so: burn them with fire.

minimaxir 12y ago
Meerkat legitimately broke Twitter rules with their autotweeting of replies to in-app comments without consent: https://support.twitter.com/articles/76915-automation-rules-and-best-practices https://support.twitter.com/articles/76915-automation-rules-... > "The @reply and Mention functions are intended to make communication between users easier, and automating these processes in order to reach many users is considered an abuse of the feature. If you are automatically sending @reply messages or Mentions to many users, the recipients must request or approve this action in advance. For example, sending automated @replies based on keyword searches is not permitted. Users should also have an easy way to opt-out of your service (in addition to the requirement that all users must opt-in before receiving the messages)" Although this behavior is still in the app I believe. Regardless, this, along with the [LIVE NOW] spam, has resulted in me unfollowing/muting everyone who uses Meerkat on Twitter, which has significantly reduced the effectiveness of Twitter for me, and which is why I think Twitter is in the right for wanting to restrict content.
- gojomo 12y ago
  Meerkat makes it fairly clear that "everything that happens on Meerkat also happens on Twitter" – and the comments on a stream only go to Twitter as replies to the original invite tweet. That's not 'automatically… to many users" but specifically to those viewing a thread, and only when individual users compose individual replies. It's not a clear violation of the quoted policy… if at all. And as you note, that's not the behavior Twitter has started.
  - minimaxir 12y ago
    > That's not 'automatically… to many users" but specifically to those viewing a thread, and only when individual users compose individual replies. Correct, but due to the Twitter mechanic where replies are shown in your feed if you are following both people (which was the case for me as the initial users are techies), it can still be a mess.

rdl 12y ago

I wonder if they strategically waited to do this at SXSW, or if they just saw abuse reach a critical point.

mhomde 12y ago
Only if they strategically wanted to market Meerkat :) I had never heard of it before and doubt I would have if it wasn't for this debacle
jusben1369 12y ago
I believe they did it _prior_ to SXSW. That's the type of event that could 10x awareness for Merkat and thus complaints when they cut it off. I have no inside knowledge but have heard it said by others they jumped on it due to SXSW.

comex 12y ago

As much as Meerkat's spam tactics downgrade my level of sympathy, I still think this is pretty awful behavior on Twitter's part. The list of people I follow is, essentially, personal information about me and them, contributed by me. I shouldn't be prevented from accessing my own information with the app or service of my choice; it shouldn't be part of a corporate fiefdom. Still waiting for the first attempt to test the legal waters on scraping Twitter.

minimaxir 12y ago
In fairness, Twitter's API endpoints for accessing followers/following have fair rate limits. (75k follower Twitter IDs every 15 minutes) https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/friends/ids https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/friends/ids This is probably the only fair endpoint that Twitter has in terms of rate limiting. Getting that scale of information via conventional scraping would be infeasable.
sehugg 12y ago
I don't think Twitter has anything against scraping lists of followers of public accounts -- after all, that's available to everyone. (One exception I think is geolocation data which can't be stored.) It's then using that information to spam Twitter itself that's the problem. Facebook, OTOH, has pretty much turned off access to the friends graph for apps other than games.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

steven2012 12y ago

Anyone who builds applications built on Twitter's or Facebook's APIs deserves whatever treatment they get. I've never seen companies that treats their API partners with as much disdain as those two companies.

rodgerd 12y ago

> the Meerkat app will no longer be able to automatically push notifications that announce the live event to all of a Meerkater's Twitter followers. Good. If "people I interact with twitter autospamming me every time they use an unrelated service" becomes A Thing then I might as well not use twitter.

jusben1369 12y ago
But how is this different to that person firing off a Tweet?
- gfosco 12y ago
  There would be some content in the tweet, instead of an almost-assuredly dead link.

paulhauggis 12y ago

If you are going to use Twitter to grow your business, at least be a little smarter about it. There are plenty of other ways to get yourself out there over Twitter without spamming users.

jusben1369 12y ago
Well in all fairness it seems like they're growing their business like crazy but pre and post access.

tehwebguy 12y ago

In case you are wondering what Meerkat actually did via Twitter's API: - Auto-follow @appmeerkat on twitter when you sign up - Auto-enable push notifications for @appmeerkat's tweets when you sign up - Auto-tweet when you schedule a stream - Auto-tweet when you start streaming - Auto-tweet when you comment on a stream This is the entire disclosure they offered: "Everything that happens on Meerkat happens on Twitter"

coryl 12y ago
How did they manage to do this? Aren't there proper permissions requests like Facebook?
- tehwebguy 12y ago
  Twitter has two primary methods of authenticating API access: 1. Web version - typical Facebook style, describes specific permissions but there are only 2 options that devs can use: read or read/write (plus read/write + direct messages but that will be gone this year) 2. iOS version - menu slides in with all of your system authorized twitter accounts, you tap the one you want I'm pretty positive #2 does not give you any real authorization messages or screens. I just logged out of Meerkat to find out but that screen doesn't work anymore because their keys are broken
MichaelGG 12y ago
Yeah the real question is why they got a phone call with any heads-up, instead of immediate account revocation.
- izacus 12y ago
  I don't know, maybe because warning a company / person that they're doing something you don't like and giving them the chance to fix it is decent behavior? Or did we remove the concept of decency from our business vocabularies already?
  - MichaelGG 12y ago

bobbytherobot 12y ago

Not that I care for what Meerkat was doing, but isn't this sort of a selling point of Fabric?

sehugg 12y ago

No one likes spam, but invitation channels are certainly drying up. I sometimes wonder how fast Facebook would have grown if email spam filtering in 2004 was as aggressive as it is today, especially considering that its early growth was among .edu addresses. (Remember that this was back before Gmail and often your email client did the bulk of spam detection, if not all .. though my memory is a little rusty)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jim_greco 12y ago

It's a cool app, but there's been a huge degradation of my stream now that it's littered with |LIVE NOW| posts and out-of-context replies. Neither of which is fixed by this unfortunately.

fapjacks 12y ago

Really, at this point, I think you're certifiably retarded if you build a business even tangentially relying on Twitter or Facebook. This is exactly why people stopped doing it years ago. Why is this surprising to anyone?

supercoder 12y ago
They aren't locked in to Twitter, they've just used it to jump start their growth. Can't argue it hasn't worked well for them with a lot of influential voice talking about the app. Not to say it will succeed in the long run, but in this case they could have done a lot worse.

inthewoods 12y ago

A counter argument: Uber breaks rules, a large number of people have no issue with it and consider it fighting an unfair regulatory system. These guys break the rules on Twitter and everyone sides with Twitter. Now, I'm on the side of Twitter in this one, but I think it's an interesting thought experiment. To me the difference is that they ended up bothering Twitter's users (as seen by the comments on this thread), whereas Uber just bothered cab drivers, cab company owners and medallion holders - a relatively small audience that has pissed off a lot people. There's also the issue of whether Twitter has a monopoly in the same sense that the cab companies do.

pbreit 12y ago
Because Meerkat made Twitter noticeably worse. All its notifications are useless in a matter of seconds or minutes (vs revolutionizing transportation to tremendous citizen delight).
- inthewoods 12y ago
  Yes, but imagine if you owned a cab company in NYC or SF - how would you be feeling?
  - marincounty 12y ago
    Or, you buy the Uber Driver pitch and buy a Uber approved 4 door car, and find you are working for less than minimum wage, or worse yet; you end up in Bankruptcy court? I don't care that Uber is providing competition--I just don't like their business plan of hiring Drivers without any risk on their part. "Oh, but you're an Independent Contractor, but you need to drive a certain year four door car from our List.(A list that doesn't make a lot of sense? Oh yea, I have found selling a four door car on the secondary market is harder than selling a two door car; if your Uber job is not what they claimed?" My point is I guess Uber provides great service for their customers, but I question the great experience for the "Independent Contractors"? Sorry, but I saw Uber and had to chime in. Back on track--Twitter--that verification email I keep forgetting to fill out.

ykumar6 12y ago

I'm surprised they even got a notice

SG- 12y ago

I don't quite get why it matters if he got 2 hours or a week. Was he going to build a Twitter clone in that time?

bobofettfett 12y ago

And it has nothing to do with Periscope.

marketcalls 12y ago

So Now the Meerkat's awesome feature soon to get replicate by twitter itself?