The Twitter Platform

[AndrewWarner]

Joel Spolsky said it best in his Mixergy interview:

basically, if you were a platform developer ... you're in a dangerous position. You are snatching nickels in front of an oncoming bulldozer.

[johns]

Which is funny, because Joel in the past year has launched one platform (FogBugz Plugins) and has another brewing (StackExchange + just released API).

[marknutter]

This is just stupid. We are now in the age where the most compelling apps interact with and remix the data that is created by other apps. Dangerous? Not exactly the word I would use. How about innovative, exciting, interesting, etc.

[spencerfry]

I've shared this feeling my entire life. I never really understood why anyone would want to build a product on the back of someone else. This is going to sound harsh, but it kind of feels like a cop out to me. And if not a cop out, certainly ridiculously risky and limiting.

[mootymoots]

"There are over 100,000 applications leveraging the Twitter API"

That's probably evidence enough that investing in developing for Twitter is kinda fruitless. There's just too much crud out there.

This coming from a Twitter iPhone app and web developer. Likely adding to the crud...

[minalecs]

fool me once, shame on you.. fool me twice, shame on me. By now we should realize the pattern with twitter is that any company that adds real value to twitter, they are more than willing to take the idea, and build a competing service. Search, trends, ads, alt. clients, and url shorteners. They fooled us all when they said they just wanted to be the pipe.

[patio11]

They fooled us all

This is at variance with my recollection of events.

[ejwcom]

Twitter development is transitioning into a hobby. As a business opportunity, it sucks. Anything of real business value you create will get sucked into the platform, so, really, there is not much point to it.

[sandipc]

search was purchased (summize)

[tansey]

Why don't people patent their Twitter apps then? It may take three years before you get it approved, but once it's in you can sue Twitter into oblivion for stealing your idea, right?

[Dirt_McGirt]

How does 3rd-party ads add value to twitter?

[chris24]

The terms [1] were just updated to reflect these changes. There are some interesting tidbits under the commercial use section, including: "In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us..."

[1] - http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms

[jimboyoungblood]

They should call it the "twax".

[tomhogans]

"Oh, paid tweets. That's a cool idea. We'll take over from here. Now get off our service."

[protomyth]

That does seem to be the new business plan: 1) develop service, 2) let others figure out a monetization strategy 3) do it yourself and change your TOS 4) repeat from step 2

[adriand]

That's hardly fair. Paid tweets are a blindingly obvious method for generating revenue - they're just Twitter's version of advertorials. The hard part is, as they say here, trying to have paid tweets that do not ruin the user experience.

Given how many webpages look these days, with more ads than content, they can't really be blamed for being concerned about third-party advertising ruining the service.

[alex1]

This begs the question: how does Twitter define a "paid" tweet? Does payment from advertiser to service or service to publisher matter? Do both? What about Foursquare/Gowalla checkins? Would those count as "paid"? What if a business rewards its mayor for all his checkins... do the mayor's tweets now count as "paid"?

[patio11]

Much like "How does Google define if a link is paid?", asking this question is less useful than you'd think: they're under no particular obligation to have consistent standards, enforce them without caprice, or avoid changing them on a whim and/or retroactively.

Plus, even if your conduct is currently kosher, they can always invent a new policy that you've already broken tomorrow.

[pyre]

They did say that they are going to clarify that...

[dabent]

I wonder if Scoopler's @WTF tweets count.

[tlrobinson]

"First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created."

Hmm this sounds familiar...

[timdorr]

TL;DR - Fuck off, ad.ly

[benatkin]

Really? I wasn't quite sure what they meant by injecting ads into the timeline. I thought it meant what the free version of Echofon does, IIRC, which is take a friends_timeline and display it with ads in between, rather than something that add advertisements to a user's statuses.

[zemaj]

The more I think about this situation, the less I like it.

At first I was happy that the service I work on was not banned by this ToS change. Even though we use twitter data for monetisation, we don't insert data into timelines.

However, when I look at the services that have now been banned, I can't see any warning signs other than that they were competing with Twitter for monetising their data. This is what my service does. Even though it's not currently banned, doesn't it make sense to abandon development now? The best I can hope for it that it isn't wildly successful, so Twitter doesn't consider it competition...

Every time I read Twitter's explanation for the situation, it reads as "we know our monetisation strategy can't compete with third parties in the short term, so we're banning all competition". Hardly conducive to fostering the best solutions, particularly when Twitter will always have the upper hand with their "official" monetisation platform and analytics for resonance, anyway. What's even worse is the the new ToS is still completely ambiguous. Until I saw Peter's post here I had no idea that the ban was only in the publishing end, not insertion.

Of course all this makes sense from Twitter's perspective, but for third parties... that just leaves us on an ever changing playing field with invisible goals. I could have lived with rules and rev share additions, but completely banning competition... not so much.

PS what's the point of this paragraph from the blog post? "We understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money. We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform." a slap in the face? We understand that we've wasted your time and money, so here's the next thing for you to waste time and money on. No guarantees, no apologies.

[simonw]

So I take it I was the only one who thought this was a strikingly clear explanation of how Twitter sees itself and how they intend to develop their ecosystem? A really excellent piece of communication.

[Sthorpe]

Should be easy for Twitter to put a limit on the number of ads that will be inserted during a period of time. Like build it into their API. API ads.

Kinda lame though. They could have just made it part of their TOS. Only X number of ads can be shown after X tweets.

Twitter must have $$ in the eyes.

[jamiequint]

Goodbye Ad.ly.

[khangtoh]

Ad.ly and a bunch of other stream advertising solution are in a precarious position.

[TotlolRon]

Platform is becoming another name for Feudalism.

[roc]

More accurately: sharecropping.