10 ms·

Twitter’s multibillion-dollar mistake happened five years ago

97 points by choult 11y ago

watson 11y ago
Am I the only one who get "403 Forbidden" when loading the link?
- RobAley 11y ago
  I got that too. It's cached by google already though : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8jwimQ6a970J:www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8jwimQ6...
- detaro 11y ago
  Nope, getting it now as well (for the entire site)
- flurdy 11y ago
  The OP just tweeted that his site has been 'slashdotted'. https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/594120911684534272 https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/594120911684534272 He has reposted it on medium: https://medium.com/@mathewi/twitter-s-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago-8f354e07881e https://medium.com/@mathewi/twitter-s-multi-billion-dollar-m... Could someone update the URL to that please?
digitalzombie 11y ago
Oh I heard about this a few years ago, interesting this goes into more details what happen and the result of trying to kill of devs. While they need devs now, I think they'll get devs back. I've seen people using machine learning on twitter to do some stuff and there are potentials with any large amount data. But I wouldn't bet the bank on Twitter as a business or a startup. I was interviewed at a start up and their whole business relied on Twitter and creating a third party software with it.
pmontra 11y ago
The post has a point about a better onboarding experience. This is an analysis of Twitter's one http://www.useronboard.com/how-twitter-onboards-new-users/ http://www.useronboard.com/how-twitter-onboards-new-users/ (not my site) About the main point of the post, I remember not having a good feeling at Twitter's strangling the 3rd party apps. It's possible that they already have all the people willing to chat in public about anything now (and the marketers) so they won't grow much more than this, but for sure a thousand companies developing business models on the top of a 140-characters messaging bus can have more ideas about expanding the platform than the only one controlling the bus. Problem: not all those ideas will benefit Twitter, some of them could even be detrimental to it. I think it's a sort of common dilemma, my platform or theirs, my vision or the one of customers? Historically both choices played well or badly. Twitter made their bet, let's wait another couple of years and see.
datashovel 11y ago
In a strange way I'm sort of hopeful the MBAs of the world continue to make these mistakes. In today's world of technology they are out of their depth and in my opinion in most cases are no longer qualified to be in the positions they've traditionally held.
- Nicholas_C 11y ago
  These us vs. them statements regarding MBAs on HN are ridiculous. And your broad generalization of MBAs as technologically inept is ridiculous as well.
  - datashovel 11y ago
    I empathize with your point of view. While I don't want to say this "broad generalization" applies to ALL scenarios, I will say that even today (in my experience) the "broad generalization" applies in MOST scenarios. I don't know how up to speed you are with how Twitter was. There was a point in time that they were infamous for their callous "slaying" of 3rd party vendors. I can't say I followed this story rigorously, but even a passive bystander understood Twitter was not about their ecosystem. They were about Twitter. I don't think it's a hopeless situation, but in my mind the only real path forward is a world where the largest tech companies build up their ecosystem and embrace 3rd party innovation and ingenuity, and not putting their heads into a guillotine when it suits them.
laumars 11y ago
> "After [Alex Payne, who ran the developer and platform side of the company for a long time] left in 2010, he described a letter that he had sent to the executive team arguing that Twitter was making a mistake by closing down the network, and that it should have made the opposite decision: that is, by becoming as open as possible. In a nutshell, he said, Twitter’s choice was to become more open — to decentralize the network — or die like other walled-garden platforms before it." A decentralised Twitter would have been amazing. I've tried playing with all kinds of services to push notifications to a variety of devices and the only thing I've ever found that I liked was Twitter - but I don't want to share private notifications with public Twitter servers (even if I do mark the account as private) One day I might actually build a service myself - but I have far too many projects on the go as it is.
- liotier 11y ago
  > decentralised Twitter would have been amazing [..] > One day I might actually build a service myself Or you might use one of the myriads of decentralized microblogging platforms, using any API you wish (REST, XMPP, whatever...) in any language you want and in a choice of BSD-like or GPL-ish licenses... The only thing missing from those platforms is users - gaining mindshare through promotion is a strength of large commercial providers.
  - laumars 11y ago
    Which services would you recommend?
    - detaro 11y ago
      I think identi.ca is one of the more important ones (which doesn't say much, I tried to figure out that ecosystem a while back and found it pretty hard to get into for outsiders)
    - dublinben 11y ago
      GNUSocial (eg Quitter.se) and Pumpio (eg Identi.ca*) are functional replacements with thriving communities.
UVB-76 11y ago
I disagree. The third party eco-system diluted the brand, restricted monetization potential, and left Twitter with little control over their user experience. Letting third parties do the hard work of experimenting with user acquisition and engagement, then buying up the best and turning their backs on the rest was a masterful move. We need an open alternative to Twitter, but as a publicly-traded for-profit organization, Twitter, Inc. will never deliver that.
- dublinben 11y ago
  >We need an open alternative to Twitter Like GNUSocial and Pumpio? What's your handle?
  - artichokeheart 11y ago
    I think pump.io is meant to be more like a G+ alternative. But you are right. Open sourced distributed alternatives exist if that's what you want all you need to do is join. GnuSocial, pump.io, Diaspora, RedMatrix, Friendica, Twister, BuddyCloud etc etc. Each has it's own community of users. Sure your close friends probably wont be there but were they on Twitter when you joined? From my own perspective zot (RedMatrix) should be the future. Whether the socialwg agrees is yet to be seen.Though I have a feeling zot will be the betamax to socialwg's eventual vhs
    - pjc50 11y ago
      I only joined twitter because someone I knew was on there. I'll join one of the decentralised alternatives when more than one person I already know mentions that they use it.
      - artichokeheart 11y ago
        That's great and it's entirely your choice. I have no problem communicating with strangers on the Internet.
  - UVB-76 11y ago
fooyc 11y ago
If they don't control the Twitter clients, they can't avoid the clients from using multiple platforms (e.g. Facebook, app.net, the newer platform). Then clients can switch away users from Twitter seamlessly. This is pretty clear from their API policies. This makes me think that all this locking is not about monetization. It's about protecting their user base. Facebook is following the same direction. Their current api version does not allow to build an alternative Facebook client.
mmahemoff 11y ago
To put it in perspective, Twitter's market cap is still $25B after taking a recent slide - that's about 10x the valuation when they started closing down APIs a few years back. I think it's a bit of a knee-jerk to start assessing their whole strategy on that basis. It pains me to say so as a developer who would have loved the old platform to remain (I had to shut down a somewhat popular hobby website because I didn't want to put in the effort to switch to OAuth). And as a user who misses a proper TweetDeck equivalent on the phone. They didn't win any friends in the developer community, but the article is about growth and it's not clear they would have achieved the same level of growth with the majority of users on 3rd party apps.
- rcarrigan87 11y ago
  The critique seems to be on Twitter's long term strategy. Shutting down 3rd parties helped them get users back on the native platform, buoying their short term results. However, without the 3rd party developers the native platform is becoming less and less interesting. We are in a very hot tech market right now so valuations are a little out of whack. Facebook has had fairly strong results the past few quarters which give investors hope Twitter can do the same. We will see!
micheljansen 11y ago
Very interesting read with Ev's recent post about open vs closed services and the future in mind ("Sometimes things stay stuck"): https://medium.com/@ev/sometimes-things-stay-stuck-a0796cc638a3 https://medium.com/@ev/sometimes-things-stay-stuck-a0796cc63...
- sergiosgc 11y ago
  Quite ironic, having the founder of medium write in favour of openness. Take WordPress and walk towards the path of the walled garden and you get medium.com.
  - micheljansen 11y ago
    Exactly. More relevant though is that he is also a founder of Twitter, which is what this post is about.
chintan 11y ago
@pg on Twitter in 2009: http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html
yyhhsj0521 11y ago
get a 403 forbidden
- schnelle 11y ago
  I do too, here's the Google Cache version of the page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
flurdy 11y ago
Twitter also recently cut access to their firehose in a similar embrace, extend, extinguish manner (sort of). Only Twitter acquired Gnip can keep using it whilst access has been cut for companies like Datasift. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/11/twitter_cuts_off_firehose_from_datasift_after_gnip_acquisition/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/11/twitter_cuts_off_fir... http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/11/twitter-ends-its-partnership-with-datasift-firehose-access-expires-on-august-13-2015/ http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/11/twitter-ends-its-partner... https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data-ecosystem/ https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data-ecosystem/ I'm not in a position to say if this is as bad as the 3rd party rugpull a few years ago, as it may only mean people have to pay Gnip for the same data instead. http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/21/processing-twitter-data-from-gnip-using-datasift/ http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/21/processing-twitter-data-...
- mattzito 11y ago
  To be clear - the only access to the firehose that has been cut off is for people who want to resell that data. The writing has been on the wall for that for quite a while - there's really no reason for Twitter to sell data to a third-party, who can then sell that data to other people. End-users of the data are still free to purchase the data from Gnip/Twitter and do whatever they want (within the TOS of Twitter)
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Why should Twitter sell data via a 3rd party? Note that DataSift tries to equalize platforms and makes Twitter look like just another option. Right alongside the companies that they have no relationship with (ones where you give them API keys and they connect for you). Datasift was also taking a rather nice cut of the money, and Twitter can easily provide the same service. Having a third party handle it, take a cut, etc. only make sense if you want to keep customers at a distance (say, to pretend to be concerned about privacy), or if you're too busy or unsure about building the service yourself Cutting Datasift off (really, just letting the contract expire) is nothing like terminating API access for third parties.
teh_klev 11y ago
I know someone has already posted a google cache copy of the page (because 403) but archive.is has a properly formatted archive of the page which is nicer on the eye: https://archive.is/CkEn8 https://archive.is/CkEn8
- schnelle 11y ago
  Thank you, this is way better!
jusben1369 11y ago
I always felt like Twitter was the Mosaic browser who tried to turn itself into AOL.
galfarragem 11y ago
I hope Twitter doesn't go away. I was a very late adopter of Twitter because I always thought that Twitter and Facebook were the same. They are not. Twitter is slowly replacing my RSS and news reader. Twitter is not a community thing, it's about broadcasting (in real-time, if you need it, most people don't, they are just addicted). That's why I don't tweet and I'm just following 11 accounts. I don't even follow friends, I just follow who has something to broadcast. Twitter is great for that. Facebook is more noisy by concept. Their focus in communities and friends makes broadcasting side noisy. I had to turn off almost all my friends/likes wall notifications, I don't have the time or will to read that one friend that I meet once a year went to the restaurant or played a game. It's just too much noise. That's why FB is nowadays mostly a chat/email friends app (and FB knows it: they bought whatsapp).
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  I'm just the opposite, I hope Twitter does go away. I think it's been bad for marketing, bad for activism, bad for internet discourse in general. Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements is not a recipe for thoughtful conversation.
  - wutbrodo 11y ago
    > Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements is not a recipe for thoughtful conversation. I have a friend who switched to Twitter a few years ago and whenever the fact that I don't use it comes up, I mention that I just can't deal with the inevitable dumbing-down and loss of context that comes with such an idiotic limitation. It's a medium designed for soundbites instead of consideration and "wit"[1] instead of intelligence. His go-to explanation is that the limitations force people to be concise and choose their words carefully. Either he's rationalizing or he's extremely naive about the quality of discourse on the Internet. [1] I mean that in the most negative way possible. "Perceived wit" might be a better term to use here: I've often seen things like pleasing sentence structure used to cover a lack of veracity, a la "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". or "YesAllWomen". While not inherently incorrect, I've seen both of those used a massive number of times in situations where they're entirely irrelevant or inaccurate. And yet, because it comes across as pithy and clever, they dominate the conversation.
jcfrei 11y ago
How would you monetize an interest graph? This seems much more difficult to me than simply forcing all users on your proprietary clients and websites and deliver ads there. It took facebook years to deliver a solid mobile experience with their native app, but now that they do, they reap the benefits.
- discardorama 11y ago
  > How would you monetize an interest graph? By becoming an ad network! That's the logical conclusion of all such endeavors in the Valley. :-)
stevebot 11y ago
While I agree that Twitter has strained relationships with developers, Fabric is a great move. For anyone who hasn't used Fabric, it is the best mobile SDK integration I have ever seen. It seamlessly works with XCode, Android Studio, IntelliJ and Eclipse to easily let you add Twitter features, distribute builds ala the now POS that is Testflight, and get cross-platform crash analytics. ...if this is a fox luring me into it's hen-house, the hen-house sure is comfy and well-featured. Sad to see it diminished in this article, when IMO it's a far far better offering than any other major companies (looking at you Facebook) are putting out.
marban 11y ago
I was Idealab's first acquisition in this story (Twidroyd) and I can only confirm that dealing with Twitter on whatever level has indeed gone downhill each and every year since then. No comparison to the days when working directly with Ev & Co. Arguing whether that's part of growing up as a Business is part of another discussion — Last time I checked that numbers weren't that convincing.
xnull2guest 11y ago
Can we speculate about this with regard to the timing of DoD's investment into Silicon Valley (and the problems the DoD has had with Twitter), or is that too conspiratorial?
- bdhe 11y ago
  You'll have to be more specific before we can speculate. What investments? What problems has the DoD had with Twitter? I'm curious to know more.
  - xnull2guest 11y ago
    DoD investment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448807 The DoD has had a problem with Twitter where they will not onboard to information sharing programs and will not censor certain types of Twitter content. Other partners, such as Facebook and Google, have been very complicit with the DoD. Twitter is willing to delete accounts, but shadowbanning content and dropping content has made them uncomfortable over the years.
x0x0 11y ago
And it's clearer why twitter bought tellapart. Twitter's problem per Ben from Stratechery is they can't grow registered users quickly enough, so they're resorting to building ads for unregistered users. The problem is those unregistered users don't monetize as well. Tellapart built ad products for ecommerce companies. I've worked in that space a bit, and the problem generally isn't registered logged-in users you know a lot about: you can do pretty good recommendations and it's relatively straightforward to advertise to them; it's just that they are a small fraction of your traffic. So tellapart, by necessity, had to get good at advertising to low information drive-by users. That's what twitter needs; not for ecommerce necessarily, but in general. It's still a shitty business though; if users aren't logged in and sharing information about themselves both directly and via data exhaust, twitter is fighting on more even ground with all other ad companies in the world and not exploiting the prize that no-one else has access to.
adventured 11y ago
Twitter's problem is that it's a transition product. The transition is one from its origins as a primitive status updater ("What are you doing?") that existed on the desktop and barely on the phone, to what it should have been all along: Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc. There was a further b.s. step in there for Twitter, when it was temporarily called a micro-blogging service. The original idea for Twitter was not too distant from what WhatsApp & Co. are today. The problem for Twitter, was that it came along too early, had to compromise on its communication vision (the now massive smart phone market wasn't primed yet), and now finds itself in the quicksand of being a half-breed legacy product that isn't the best solution for any particular thing. Twitter was supposed to be a communication platform. It failed to become that, WhatsApp is going to have a billion users soon and took Twitter's future, and Twitter has been left behind as an advanced variation of a status update service. It lost its future, and the product as is has a limited potential that will soon be all tapped out.
feraloink 11y ago
Payment due? http://www.mathewingram.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi http://www.mathewingram.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi
- mathewi 11y ago
  Nah, they just had to move my account to a different server and I didn't update the DNS nameserver info quickly enough.
  - feraloink 11y ago
    Where can I read your article then?
    - mathewi 11y ago
      Should be here: http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-b...

97 points by choult 11y ago

watson 11y ago

Am I the only one who get "403 Forbidden" when loading the link?

RobAley 11y ago
I got that too. It's cached by google already though : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8jwimQ6a970J:www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8jwimQ6...
detaro 11y ago
Nope, getting it now as well (for the entire site)
flurdy 11y ago
The OP just tweeted that his site has been 'slashdotted'. https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/594120911684534272 https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/594120911684534272 He has reposted it on medium: https://medium.com/@mathewi/twitter-s-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago-8f354e07881e https://medium.com/@mathewi/twitter-s-multi-billion-dollar-m... Could someone update the URL to that please?

digitalzombie 11y ago

Oh I heard about this a few years ago, interesting this goes into more details what happen and the result of trying to kill of devs. While they need devs now, I think they'll get devs back. I've seen people using machine learning on twitter to do some stuff and there are potentials with any large amount data. But I wouldn't bet the bank on Twitter as a business or a startup. I was interviewed at a start up and their whole business relied on Twitter and creating a third party software with it.

pmontra 11y ago

The post has a point about a better onboarding experience. This is an analysis of Twitter's one http://www.useronboard.com/how-twitter-onboards-new-users/ http://www.useronboard.com/how-twitter-onboards-new-users/ (not my site) About the main point of the post, I remember not having a good feeling at Twitter's strangling the 3rd party apps. It's possible that they already have all the people willing to chat in public about anything now (and the marketers) so they won't grow much more than this, but for sure a thousand companies developing business models on the top of a 140-characters messaging bus can have more ideas about expanding the platform than the only one controlling the bus. Problem: not all those ideas will benefit Twitter, some of them could even be detrimental to it. I think it's a sort of common dilemma, my platform or theirs, my vision or the one of customers? Historically both choices played well or badly. Twitter made their bet, let's wait another couple of years and see.

datashovel 11y ago

In a strange way I'm sort of hopeful the MBAs of the world continue to make these mistakes. In today's world of technology they are out of their depth and in my opinion in most cases are no longer qualified to be in the positions they've traditionally held.

Nicholas_C 11y ago
These us vs. them statements regarding MBAs on HN are ridiculous. And your broad generalization of MBAs as technologically inept is ridiculous as well.
- datashovel 11y ago
  I empathize with your point of view. While I don't want to say this "broad generalization" applies to ALL scenarios, I will say that even today (in my experience) the "broad generalization" applies in MOST scenarios. I don't know how up to speed you are with how Twitter was. There was a point in time that they were infamous for their callous "slaying" of 3rd party vendors. I can't say I followed this story rigorously, but even a passive bystander understood Twitter was not about their ecosystem. They were about Twitter. I don't think it's a hopeless situation, but in my mind the only real path forward is a world where the largest tech companies build up their ecosystem and embrace 3rd party innovation and ingenuity, and not putting their heads into a guillotine when it suits them.

laumars 11y ago

> "After [Alex Payne, who ran the developer and platform side of the company for a long time] left in 2010, he described a letter that he had sent to the executive team arguing that Twitter was making a mistake by closing down the network, and that it should have made the opposite decision: that is, by becoming as open as possible. In a nutshell, he said, Twitter’s choice was to become more open — to decentralize the network — or die like other walled-garden platforms before it." A decentralised Twitter would have been amazing. I've tried playing with all kinds of services to push notifications to a variety of devices and the only thing I've ever found that I liked was Twitter - but I don't want to share private notifications with public Twitter servers (even if I do mark the account as private) One day I might actually build a service myself - but I have far too many projects on the go as it is.

liotier 11y ago
> decentralised Twitter would have been amazing [..] > One day I might actually build a service myself Or you might use one of the myriads of decentralized microblogging platforms, using any API you wish (REST, XMPP, whatever...) in any language you want and in a choice of BSD-like or GPL-ish licenses... The only thing missing from those platforms is users - gaining mindshare through promotion is a strength of large commercial providers.
- laumars 11y ago
  Which services would you recommend?
  - detaro 11y ago
    I think identi.ca is one of the more important ones (which doesn't say much, I tried to figure out that ecosystem a while back and found it pretty hard to get into for outsiders)
  - dublinben 11y ago
    GNUSocial (eg Quitter.se) and Pumpio (eg Identi.ca*) are functional replacements with thriving communities.

UVB-76 11y ago

I disagree. The third party eco-system diluted the brand, restricted monetization potential, and left Twitter with little control over their user experience. Letting third parties do the hard work of experimenting with user acquisition and engagement, then buying up the best and turning their backs on the rest was a masterful move. We need an open alternative to Twitter, but as a publicly-traded for-profit organization, Twitter, Inc. will never deliver that.

dublinben 11y ago
>We need an open alternative to Twitter Like GNUSocial and Pumpio? What's your handle?
- artichokeheart 11y ago
  I think pump.io is meant to be more like a G+ alternative. But you are right. Open sourced distributed alternatives exist if that's what you want all you need to do is join. GnuSocial, pump.io, Diaspora, RedMatrix, Friendica, Twister, BuddyCloud etc etc. Each has it's own community of users. Sure your close friends probably wont be there but were they on Twitter when you joined? From my own perspective zot (RedMatrix) should be the future. Whether the socialwg agrees is yet to be seen.Though I have a feeling zot will be the betamax to socialwg's eventual vhs
  - pjc50 11y ago
    I only joined twitter because someone I knew was on there. I'll join one of the decentralised alternatives when more than one person I already know mentions that they use it.
    - artichokeheart 11y ago
      That's great and it's entirely your choice. I have no problem communicating with strangers on the Internet.
- UVB-76 11y ago

fooyc 11y ago

If they don't control the Twitter clients, they can't avoid the clients from using multiple platforms (e.g. Facebook, app.net, the newer platform). Then clients can switch away users from Twitter seamlessly. This is pretty clear from their API policies. This makes me think that all this locking is not about monetization. It's about protecting their user base. Facebook is following the same direction. Their current api version does not allow to build an alternative Facebook client.

mmahemoff 11y ago

To put it in perspective, Twitter's market cap is still $25B after taking a recent slide - that's about 10x the valuation when they started closing down APIs a few years back. I think it's a bit of a knee-jerk to start assessing their whole strategy on that basis. It pains me to say so as a developer who would have loved the old platform to remain (I had to shut down a somewhat popular hobby website because I didn't want to put in the effort to switch to OAuth). And as a user who misses a proper TweetDeck equivalent on the phone. They didn't win any friends in the developer community, but the article is about growth and it's not clear they would have achieved the same level of growth with the majority of users on 3rd party apps.

rcarrigan87 11y ago
The critique seems to be on Twitter's long term strategy. Shutting down 3rd parties helped them get users back on the native platform, buoying their short term results. However, without the 3rd party developers the native platform is becoming less and less interesting. We are in a very hot tech market right now so valuations are a little out of whack. Facebook has had fairly strong results the past few quarters which give investors hope Twitter can do the same. We will see!

micheljansen 11y ago

Very interesting read with Ev's recent post about open vs closed services and the future in mind ("Sometimes things stay stuck"): https://medium.com/@ev/sometimes-things-stay-stuck-a0796cc638a3 https://medium.com/@ev/sometimes-things-stay-stuck-a0796cc63...

sergiosgc 11y ago
Quite ironic, having the founder of medium write in favour of openness. Take WordPress and walk towards the path of the walled garden and you get medium.com.
- micheljansen 11y ago
  Exactly. More relevant though is that he is also a founder of Twitter, which is what this post is about.

chintan 11y ago

@pg on Twitter in 2009: http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html http://www.paulgraham.com/twitter.html

yyhhsj0521 11y ago

get a 403 forbidden

schnelle 11y ago
I do too, here's the Google Cache version of the page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

flurdy 11y ago

Twitter also recently cut access to their firehose in a similar embrace, extend, extinguish manner (sort of). Only Twitter acquired Gnip can keep using it whilst access has been cut for companies like Datasift. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/11/twitter_cuts_off_firehose_from_datasift_after_gnip_acquisition/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/11/twitter_cuts_off_fir... http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/11/twitter-ends-its-partnership-with-datasift-firehose-access-expires-on-august-13-2015/ http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/11/twitter-ends-its-partner... https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data-ecosystem/ https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data-ecosystem/ I'm not in a position to say if this is as bad as the 3rd party rugpull a few years ago, as it may only mean people have to pay Gnip for the same data instead. http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/21/processing-twitter-data-from-gnip-using-datasift/ http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/21/processing-twitter-data-...

mattzito 11y ago
To be clear - the only access to the firehose that has been cut off is for people who want to resell that data. The writing has been on the wall for that for quite a while - there's really no reason for Twitter to sell data to a third-party, who can then sell that data to other people. End-users of the data are still free to purchase the data from Gnip/Twitter and do whatever they want (within the TOS of Twitter)
MichaelGG 11y ago
Why should Twitter sell data via a 3rd party? Note that DataSift tries to equalize platforms and makes Twitter look like just another option. Right alongside the companies that they have no relationship with (ones where you give them API keys and they connect for you). Datasift was also taking a rather nice cut of the money, and Twitter can easily provide the same service. Having a third party handle it, take a cut, etc. only make sense if you want to keep customers at a distance (say, to pretend to be concerned about privacy), or if you're too busy or unsure about building the service yourself Cutting Datasift off (really, just letting the contract expire) is nothing like terminating API access for third parties.

teh_klev 11y ago

I know someone has already posted a google cache copy of the page (because 403) but archive.is has a properly formatted archive of the page which is nicer on the eye: https://archive.is/CkEn8 https://archive.is/CkEn8

schnelle 11y ago
Thank you, this is way better!

jusben1369 11y ago

I always felt like Twitter was the Mosaic browser who tried to turn itself into AOL.

galfarragem 11y ago

I hope Twitter doesn't go away. I was a very late adopter of Twitter because I always thought that Twitter and Facebook were the same. They are not. Twitter is slowly replacing my RSS and news reader. Twitter is not a community thing, it's about broadcasting (in real-time, if you need it, most people don't, they are just addicted). That's why I don't tweet and I'm just following 11 accounts. I don't even follow friends, I just follow who has something to broadcast. Twitter is great for that. Facebook is more noisy by concept. Their focus in communities and friends makes broadcasting side noisy. I had to turn off almost all my friends/likes wall notifications, I don't have the time or will to read that one friend that I meet once a year went to the restaurant or played a game. It's just too much noise. That's why FB is nowadays mostly a chat/email friends app (and FB knows it: they bought whatsapp).

ForHackernews 11y ago
I'm just the opposite, I hope Twitter does go away. I think it's been bad for marketing, bad for activism, bad for internet discourse in general. Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements is not a recipe for thoughtful conversation.
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  > Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements is not a recipe for thoughtful conversation. I have a friend who switched to Twitter a few years ago and whenever the fact that I don't use it comes up, I mention that I just can't deal with the inevitable dumbing-down and loss of context that comes with such an idiotic limitation. It's a medium designed for soundbites instead of consideration and "wit"[1] instead of intelligence. His go-to explanation is that the limitations force people to be concise and choose their words carefully. Either he's rationalizing or he's extremely naive about the quality of discourse on the Internet. [1] I mean that in the most negative way possible. "Perceived wit" might be a better term to use here: I've often seen things like pleasing sentence structure used to cover a lack of veracity, a la "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". or "YesAllWomen". While not inherently incorrect, I've seen both of those used a massive number of times in situations where they're entirely irrelevant or inaccurate. And yet, because it comes across as pithy and clever, they dominate the conversation.

jcfrei 11y ago

How would you monetize an interest graph? This seems much more difficult to me than simply forcing all users on your proprietary clients and websites and deliver ads there. It took facebook years to deliver a solid mobile experience with their native app, but now that they do, they reap the benefits.

discardorama 11y ago
> How would you monetize an interest graph? By becoming an ad network! That's the logical conclusion of all such endeavors in the Valley. :-)

stevebot 11y ago

While I agree that Twitter has strained relationships with developers, Fabric is a great move. For anyone who hasn't used Fabric, it is the best mobile SDK integration I have ever seen. It seamlessly works with XCode, Android Studio, IntelliJ and Eclipse to easily let you add Twitter features, distribute builds ala the now POS that is Testflight, and get cross-platform crash analytics. ...if this is a fox luring me into it's hen-house, the hen-house sure is comfy and well-featured. Sad to see it diminished in this article, when IMO it's a far far better offering than any other major companies (looking at you Facebook) are putting out.

marban 11y ago

I was Idealab's first acquisition in this story (Twidroyd) and I can only confirm that dealing with Twitter on whatever level has indeed gone downhill each and every year since then. No comparison to the days when working directly with Ev & Co. Arguing whether that's part of growing up as a Business is part of another discussion — Last time I checked that numbers weren't that convincing.

xnull2guest 11y ago

Can we speculate about this with regard to the timing of DoD's investment into Silicon Valley (and the problems the DoD has had with Twitter), or is that too conspiratorial?

bdhe 11y ago
You'll have to be more specific before we can speculate. What investments? What problems has the DoD had with Twitter? I'm curious to know more.
- xnull2guest 11y ago
  DoD investment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448807 The DoD has had a problem with Twitter where they will not onboard to information sharing programs and will not censor certain types of Twitter content. Other partners, such as Facebook and Google, have been very complicit with the DoD. Twitter is willing to delete accounts, but shadowbanning content and dropping content has made them uncomfortable over the years.

x0x0 11y ago

And it's clearer why twitter bought tellapart. Twitter's problem per Ben from Stratechery is they can't grow registered users quickly enough, so they're resorting to building ads for unregistered users. The problem is those unregistered users don't monetize as well. Tellapart built ad products for ecommerce companies. I've worked in that space a bit, and the problem generally isn't registered logged-in users you know a lot about: you can do pretty good recommendations and it's relatively straightforward to advertise to them; it's just that they are a small fraction of your traffic. So tellapart, by necessity, had to get good at advertising to low information drive-by users. That's what twitter needs; not for ecommerce necessarily, but in general. It's still a shitty business though; if users aren't logged in and sharing information about themselves both directly and via data exhaust, twitter is fighting on more even ground with all other ad companies in the world and not exploiting the prize that no-one else has access to.

adventured 11y ago

Twitter's problem is that it's a transition product. The transition is one from its origins as a primitive status updater ("What are you doing?") that existed on the desktop and barely on the phone, to what it should have been all along: Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc. There was a further b.s. step in there for Twitter, when it was temporarily called a micro-blogging service. The original idea for Twitter was not too distant from what WhatsApp & Co. are today. The problem for Twitter, was that it came along too early, had to compromise on its communication vision (the now massive smart phone market wasn't primed yet), and now finds itself in the quicksand of being a half-breed legacy product that isn't the best solution for any particular thing. Twitter was supposed to be a communication platform. It failed to become that, WhatsApp is going to have a billion users soon and took Twitter's future, and Twitter has been left behind as an advanced variation of a status update service. It lost its future, and the product as is has a limited potential that will soon be all tapped out.

feraloink 11y ago

Payment due? http://www.mathewingram.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi http://www.mathewingram.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi

mathewi 11y ago
Nah, they just had to move my account to a different server and I didn't update the DNS nameserver info quickly enough.
- feraloink 11y ago
  Where can I read your article then?
  - mathewi 11y ago
    Should be here: http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-happened-five-years-ago/ http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2015/04/30/twitters-multi-b...