This doesn't surprise me at all. When you develop on someone else's platform, you have to walk a fine line between not being successful at all and being too successful such that the platform provider co-opts your business (maybe you get lucky and get bought out). This is nothing new. Such moves as this were (IMHO) inevitable. They'll slowly chip away at anything they see as taking revenue from them.
The part I disagree with is that this will doom Twitter. It will not. They've already achieved a certain level of success. Most people use and will continue to use the Website or the official client and be happy with that.
I do believe that Twitter is doomed to be acquired however. Apple seems the likely frontrunner for this but I think Twitter needs Apple more than Apple needs Twitter at this point.
Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.
There are many reasons I'm glad about Facebook's floundering market debut. This is one of them: it's taking the wind out of the sails of the social hype (IMHO).
"Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace."
Like others I tire of the dragging out Myspace as that guy who started on weed and ended up an incontinent meth addict in the gutter but the core of this premise is correct, the 'useful' part of Twitter is as an infrastructure.
Small digression, when I was at Sun we had pushed out NFS to anyone and everyone, it was completely 'open' in the sense that we published all the protocols and anyone could build a compatible clients. Since this was web 0.01 the only servers and clients were in the same building generally but still the easy access, the documented protocol, and a thousand flowers bloomed. You could get your implementation 'blessed' as being standard by coming to Connectathon and proving you could interact with all of the other approved implementations there. NFS is everywhere, available for nearly every compute platform. It was infrastructure.
At an important meeting on the future of NFS (and a new proposed product called "ONC plus" which would have per client charges, and strict licensing controls. I argued with Ed Zander (then president of Sunsoft) over the wisdom of changing the NFS model. The business development guys had computed that if everyone that was currently using NFS was paying just $10 per client per year for a license, SunSoft would be the most profitable part of the Sun Microsystems universe. I asked Ed if he knew how many people would run NFS if it were $10/client, he pointed to the bizdev projections, and I told him no, it would be exactly zero. Zero because nobody would pay money to Sun for a technology they were not sure would work (AT&T had tried that with their DFS product in System V), and they certainly wouldn't base a business that needed it if Sun could pull the plug at any time or raise the price. And finally, the whole 'Open' thing only worked when you allowed other people to play. As I recall he reminded me to stick to the technical decisions and leave making a business out of it to people who understood such things.
Twitter is Twitter because it is Twitter. That twisted circular definition captures that something simple and free caught the imagination of millions of people and became something greater than itself. It became an infrastructure. But unlike Cities or other large corporations which have a revenue stream to cover the costs of their infrastructure, Twitter does not.
And so they are in the throes of discovering what is, and what is not, a business opportunity in the Twitter universe. And that discovery process is painful, and prone to missteps. Seeing Myspace wheezing in the gutter I do not think they would make the same exact missteps, while they could end up irrelevant, they have more options. They do need to understand how people value them, and understand how much of that value is "them" and how much is their partners. That is a complex thing. A great example of that process is looking at their on again / off again 'firehose' pricing model.
I think they have a lot going for them, but they have to figure this stuff out, and quickly. Folks like Google and Apple and Facebook aren't going to just sit around and do nothing. Watching them walk through the minefield that is API handling should be instructive to anyone here who hopes to do the same at some point.
Everyone cites Myspace. Either Twitter or Facebook does something controversial and we hear everyone citing Myspace. Myspace didn't lose it's user base due to amazing UX for end-user. They lost their user base due to combination of bad UX and "mobile" user base. Majority of Myspace users were teenagers and by the time they went to college they had hot new social network in form of Facebook, which was exclusively for them. And Myspace was never big in non-English speaking markets.
Twitter on the other hand offers good UX. They have loyal user base of millions of users from different age groups. They are huge in Asian markets. And they have celebrity users, governments, political leaders, olympians etc. It will be very hard to move entire user base from Twitter to some other service.
App.net is an interesting alternative. And they can disrupt real-time information market. I think App.net can have number of use cases like firehose of realtime feeds for devs . But killing Twitter entirely will be very hard!
EDIT 1: Grammar
EDIT 2: Twitter for me is more than infrastructure utility. It's my primary information network.
To reinforcer this point: in the early days of Twitter it kept falling over under the load - the one thing infrastructure should never do. It didn't matter.
To further reinforcer this point: OSStatus/Identi.ca has a widely deployed, API compatible implementation of Twitter. That really is infrastructure, and yet it has had approximately zero impact on Twitter's growth or strategy - because Twitter isn't infrastructure.
(Unless you mean it in the way that every single online service is ultimately infrastructure - but I don't think this is what you meant).
Twitter has eyeballs too
You say that like it is a minor point, whereas actually it is 90% of what matters.
It also has the publishers people want to follow, for whatever your particular niche is.
social platforms seem fickle at best
Actually, social platforms aren't fickle: they are usually incredibly sticky (see the huge number of forums that have been running for 10+ years). Most people just look at the "social network" category and see how Friendster/MySpace/Bebo/Hi5/etc all got destroyed by the Facebook juggernaut.
They never talk about the success of LinkedIn/PInterest/Twitter/Reddit/etc.
In every case, those overran competitors of their own (including Facebook in some cases) to dominate their categories.
That's not "fickle", that is platform strategy and product development.
There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.
MySpace sold to News Ltd, and then went downhill. Maybe Twitter won't sell itself to a company that is actively internet-hostile. But yes, you are correct: potentially any company could fail.
Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization
Interesting take. Seems almost exactly the opposite to me. What makes Twitter valuable is not the "eyeballs," or even the infrastructure, but rather the pulse of content. It had what essentially amounted to first-mover advantage in the sphere of mobile content, and that is why none of the Twitter clones have been able to take its place.
That said, this direction Twitter is going toward "more closed" is wrong. Given that it's the market-researcher's goldmine of content that makes Twitter valuable, disallowing developers the ability to build infrastructure on top of that content seems really stupid. Raw data is not useful; the organizing of, packaging and presenting of that data is where the business value can be (profitably) delivered. It can be profitable for both Twitter and developers.
> Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization.
This couldn't be further from the truth, and the thousands of copycat networks, not least from Google, are proof that networks can't be commoditized.
The only reason I am still on GitHub, Facebook, hn, reddit and Twitter - despite there being better 'products' and 'infrastructure'- is because everybody else is, and the same applies to them.
I don't think this move, in an of itself, will doom Twitter, but it is just another example of why Twitter and its model aren't working.
The problem with Twitter is the same problem that plagues innumerable startups - they've built a product without even once thinking about the business model, and are not scrambling for revenue.
Inexorably, everything they do in the pursuit of revenue is going to involve making the product worse for users. Ad injection, loss of 3rd-party apps that support the ecosystem, all of that is just example after example of how a business with no built-in monetization will eventually cannibalize itself in the pursuit of revenue.
I think this is the most important point, one that most people -- Twitter included -- seem to overlook or ignore.
What we need is an open Twitter-like protocol -- but for it to be successful it should be peer-to-peer, not server-based like Twitter. A few year ago I was working on a startup which would build precisely such a protocol, but my partners backed out before we could lift anything off ground.
One of ideas was to make the client double as a Twitter client, in order to attract a wider user base. This would be less viable now, with the new Twitter API restrictions, but I would still love to see someone develop something like that.
I don't see the part about this change dooming Twitter in the article.
You have an interesting point about commoditization, however. It makes me think about the IM space and all the different services there.
As for eyeballs, I think a Twitter competitor can do what media companies do — pay for certain celebrities, authors, speakers to move their microblog to their service — do a few of those, and you'll start to have an audience.
"There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace."
Is there anything preventing any social network from becoming the next MySpace? Seems to me it is all in the users, if the users leave you are the next MySpace. I don't see how you could force users not to leave?
Of all the social media and web services that have cropped up in the last 5 years, Twitter was the one that really filled me with joy. It's so simple! It's just plain text in bite sized pieces at a time. And it's universal! It works just as well on state of the art hardware as it does on a crappy SMS dumbphone or green-screen serial terminal. And it's as compelling in Egypt or Pakistan as it is in New York or London.
Whenever I get fed up with the complextiy of Facebook or Google+ I'll load up Twitter on an old Apple II, via TTYtter and a serial connection; I'll watch the green text scroll along at 1200 baud and think about how this one simple, geeky text service, pure as a 1980s BBS, somehow made it, worldwide, in 2012.
And now they're hellbent on ruining all of that. Fuck Twitter.
Sometimes I tend to see the dark side of human in everything they do. Sorry, its just the way I am.
I say when twitter was still this little chick, their approach was "we love all users, we welcome engineers; build amazing tools and surprise us!". I think the reason for that was to speed up the process of spreading the word - a simple fact that geek working on twitter 3rd party is still a human with plenty of friends to spread the word about twitter - so he can be helpful: let him spend his time doing what he likes doing the best - programming and he will become our cheap (free) PR tube.
But now I bet most of a new age civilization knows or uses twitter. So it is time for a reality check: "fuck off of our platform; we don't need you anymore! You got all your friends to know twitter, some even addict to it; now stay away from trying to run your pathetic queries, using our own data stream".
Just my version/2c.
edit: my understanding is that Dorsey still has the most to say in the twitter world. With all its nastiness going on between twitter curtain, I say stay the hell far away from any startup he will do in the future. Sorry, but if he signs up half of the world on his square, what on Earth is stopping him from switching 2.5% to 10% fee?? nothing!! At least the past (present) shows he has the balls to execute moves that average tweeting Joe is not a fan of: shutting down 3rd parties, kicking out linkedin, shutting down instagram access, etc. Bottom line: stay away!
It doesn't make sense to make this personal. Business models inevitably change when startups grow up. You can't expect a company that needs to create network effects to act exactly the same as one that needs to exploit them in order to make some money and pay back investors.
Twitter got the funding to build that massive infrastructure only because someone believed that they would eventually be able to monetize it. Twitter is not a public utility and everyone knew it.
The conclusion isn't to never use something one particular guy does. The conclusion is this: If you build on someone elses infrastructure, make a contract or make sure you exit before the tide turns.
Square doesn't have a network effect, it doesn't really matter if one store uses square, and the neighboring store uses google wallet, dwolla, or something else.
If Twitter's business is threatened by third-party apps, why not charge for an API license? I also can't quite understand why developers expect a free API from services like Twitter and then complain when something changes?
What is the business advantage of Twitter (or Facebook, or what-have-you) releasing a free, public API to anyone who asks, and how did they plan to monetize it when it got popular? You can't build your business model around "here, use my service for free" and not have a plan how to convert either the users of the 3rd party developers' software or the 3rd party developers themselves into paying customers (or monetize on that somehow, i.e. mining data, selling ads, etc). Maybe I'm just being naive -- I honestly don't have much experience dealing with these sorts of things, so I would love it if someone could break it down.
I agree with you. Google's model is pretty good with most of their 25+ APIs having free tiers. Free is nice but being in a real business relationship feels better to me because it is more likely to be sustainable. Microsoft's API marketplace has the same solid sustainable feeling.
If a business idea requires free use of other people's services then think of another idea.
The large swath of discussion seems to be focusing on App Development, which is probably the hardest hit.
However, there's another area that has gotten me wondering, non-app, non-client based websites using the API, in reference to the Display Guidelines..er Rules.
This is the bit specifically.
"Users must have a consistent experience wherever they interact with Tweets, whether on Twitter.com, a mobile client, website, or in an application developed with the Twitter API"
So lets say that I go to GitHub and grab a little jQuery plugin to pull in my tweets on my personal portfolio. Does that also mean I have to make sure I include my own avatar, my username, Tweet actions, and twitter branding, among other things? What if those elements are unnecessary to the design or intention of what I'm doing on the site?
And then there's the fact that all of these jQuery plugins are going to have to start implementing authenticated access (if they weren't already, which many seem to not be.) I don't have access to data on the matter, but I would surmise that there's a significant number of personal and portfolio sites out there pulling in tweets that are either not authenticated, or are modifying the tweet display in some way. All the ones I've interacted with have settings for turning avatar display on or off, or unlinking hash tags or links, etc.
edit: you can use any username with any password to sign in to nstatus. It then uses that password for your username. You can even do this from the official iOS Twitter app, just sign in.
Twitter's own clients are fine. You can read tweets and send tweets. That's the basis of the service. It's supposed to be simple. Why don't you like it?
But who is keeping app.net from doing the same thing once they killed Twitter and reached a size where they can say: Thanks for all your friends, now get off of our platform.
We need open protocols and a decentralized social network where we have different implementations with focus on different use cases which are still able to communicate with one another.
A good chunk of the protocols and implementations is already there with OAuth, Activity streams, salmon, RSS and such. And there are already open sourced implementations like status.net and others alike.
The solution is already there. We only need to start using it.
Unless platforms like Facbeook or Twitter make a significant amount of money from their devs, the way Microsoft or Apple does, telling their devs to go pound sand at some point is inevitable.
Twitter wants to give you access to the data. Their client is their main product. Thus, every 3rd party client is competing with their main product, that seems to be a fact.
Theres no way to stop you from building one anyway, twitter knows that. If you go against their rules, you're a revolutionary, and if you win that revolution, they'll have to deal with you.
You can't expect however, that the incumbent is going to go around encouraging revolutions against themselves.
The only alternative is to encourage everyone to make clients, at which point, they're just a big cloud xmpp server to the world.
I find it ironic that the company that's created Bootstrap - an entire toolkit encouraging developers to adopt their site's visual style - is so opposed to any other aspect of following their lead.
It seems to me that if Twitter were able to offer their API freely to devs at zero cost to themselves, they would do so.
Twitter bootstrap, on the other hand, is something they built for themselves to reduce the friction of creating rich, consistent UIs. Developing it is a sunk cost. Offering it free to the world should cost them nothing as it's hosted on Github [1].
Like others in this thread, I lament that Twitter has become less egalitarian. Moving forward, developers with one idea of usage will have more Twitter clout than developers with "lesser" ideas, but Twitter has bills to pay and investors to answer to. It's far from an ideal world, but I can't offer them a better solution for their problems.
At that point Twitter will simply block IP address, or some such. Sure there will be a game of catch me if you can, but the end is that no one really wins, and Twitter may suffer because people will use it to bad mouth Twitter. Enough user sentiment, even if it start from the devs of a few highly used apps, and Twitter might want to reconsider.
What client devs have actually stopped development and abandoned/shut down their applications in response to Twitter's client TOS changes? I hear lots of griping and moaning it seems like lots of the major client players are developing nonetheless, which says to twitter "keep doing what you're doing."
Developers seem to flock to platforms like Apple, Facebook and Twitter based on the fact that they have a large and growing user base without giving thought to this issue of commoditization of complements and how the ultimately destroy the business or livelihood of these developers.
Most people building products or sharecropping on other people's platform never make meaningful income and yet those platform keep will prefer to announce large sums paid out to developers to encourage you to keep building complements. Apple will claim they paid out $5 billion but spread the numerous app developers it becomes peanut and not enough to pay their bills. They won't tell you that to pay out $5bn they made atleast $2billion based on their 30% cut.
They don't tell you that iOS app success is a "lottery": 60% (or more) of developers don't break even
I really hope people will think hard before building their business on the back of Apple, Facebook, Twitter or any such platform. You can use them as as distribution without being dependent on them and that is the way to go.
Be your own bitch and not a Twitter, Apple or Facebook bitch:
Twitter's developer problem is probably at about level 9 right now. My question is what's really the big deal. Twitter can do what they want and really more to the point, I don't think Twitter should be the primary focus of innovation from our community. It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages. I get it it, it's amazing ... but come on, we can get past Twitter.
The blog post is actually annoyingly ambiguous - do they want to limit all the stuff in the "consumer engagement" quadrant, or just the "traditional clients," while encouraging other sorts of "consumer engagement" (they mention, and don't make clear if they're in favor of or against, Favstar and Storify).
can't say I blame them really. They have a product, they have the infrastructure to support it....why shouldn't they have right of first refusal on how to monetize the thing?
Seems to me that developers are getting all pissy because they can't have free reign to a platform that isn't even theirs. Perhaps, at the end of the day, Twitter doesn't care - they don't need the developers as early adopters anymore and it must be a fair old strain to keep the api infrastructure supporting them when the resources could be more profitably used building something else inside the company.
Couldn't Twitter just arrange a price for "business" usage of their API? The main people getting affected by this are other clients or other intensive uses of their API, but those very people are most probably trying to make a profit themselves (HootSuite for example) so why not just charge for the API and so leave the restricted API for free use. Or am I missing the point?
[+] [-] cletus|13 years ago|reply
The part I disagree with is that this will doom Twitter. It will not. They've already achieved a certain level of success. Most people use and will continue to use the Website or the official client and be happy with that.
I do believe that Twitter is doomed to be acquired however. Apple seems the likely frontrunner for this but I think Twitter needs Apple more than Apple needs Twitter at this point.
Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.
There are many reasons I'm glad about Facebook's floundering market debut. This is one of them: it's taking the wind out of the sails of the social hype (IMHO).
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
Like others I tire of the dragging out Myspace as that guy who started on weed and ended up an incontinent meth addict in the gutter but the core of this premise is correct, the 'useful' part of Twitter is as an infrastructure.
Small digression, when I was at Sun we had pushed out NFS to anyone and everyone, it was completely 'open' in the sense that we published all the protocols and anyone could build a compatible clients. Since this was web 0.01 the only servers and clients were in the same building generally but still the easy access, the documented protocol, and a thousand flowers bloomed. You could get your implementation 'blessed' as being standard by coming to Connectathon and proving you could interact with all of the other approved implementations there. NFS is everywhere, available for nearly every compute platform. It was infrastructure.
At an important meeting on the future of NFS (and a new proposed product called "ONC plus" which would have per client charges, and strict licensing controls. I argued with Ed Zander (then president of Sunsoft) over the wisdom of changing the NFS model. The business development guys had computed that if everyone that was currently using NFS was paying just $10 per client per year for a license, SunSoft would be the most profitable part of the Sun Microsystems universe. I asked Ed if he knew how many people would run NFS if it were $10/client, he pointed to the bizdev projections, and I told him no, it would be exactly zero. Zero because nobody would pay money to Sun for a technology they were not sure would work (AT&T had tried that with their DFS product in System V), and they certainly wouldn't base a business that needed it if Sun could pull the plug at any time or raise the price. And finally, the whole 'Open' thing only worked when you allowed other people to play. As I recall he reminded me to stick to the technical decisions and leave making a business out of it to people who understood such things.
Twitter is Twitter because it is Twitter. That twisted circular definition captures that something simple and free caught the imagination of millions of people and became something greater than itself. It became an infrastructure. But unlike Cities or other large corporations which have a revenue stream to cover the costs of their infrastructure, Twitter does not.
And so they are in the throes of discovering what is, and what is not, a business opportunity in the Twitter universe. And that discovery process is painful, and prone to missteps. Seeing Myspace wheezing in the gutter I do not think they would make the same exact missteps, while they could end up irrelevant, they have more options. They do need to understand how people value them, and understand how much of that value is "them" and how much is their partners. That is a complex thing. A great example of that process is looking at their on again / off again 'firehose' pricing model.
I think they have a lot going for them, but they have to figure this stuff out, and quickly. Folks like Google and Apple and Facebook aren't going to just sit around and do nothing. Watching them walk through the minefield that is API handling should be instructive to anyone here who hopes to do the same at some point.
[+] [-] dm8|13 years ago|reply
Twitter on the other hand offers good UX. They have loyal user base of millions of users from different age groups. They are huge in Asian markets. And they have celebrity users, governments, political leaders, olympians etc. It will be very hard to move entire user base from Twitter to some other service.
App.net is an interesting alternative. And they can disrupt real-time information market. I think App.net can have number of use cases like firehose of realtime feeds for devs . But killing Twitter entirely will be very hard!
EDIT 1: Grammar
EDIT 2: Twitter for me is more than infrastructure utility. It's my primary information network.
[+] [-] nl|13 years ago|reply
Bullshit.
To reinforcer this point: in the early days of Twitter it kept falling over under the load - the one thing infrastructure should never do. It didn't matter.
To further reinforcer this point: OSStatus/Identi.ca has a widely deployed, API compatible implementation of Twitter. That really is infrastructure, and yet it has had approximately zero impact on Twitter's growth or strategy - because Twitter isn't infrastructure.
(Unless you mean it in the way that every single online service is ultimately infrastructure - but I don't think this is what you meant).
Twitter has eyeballs too
You say that like it is a minor point, whereas actually it is 90% of what matters.
It also has the publishers people want to follow, for whatever your particular niche is.
social platforms seem fickle at best
Actually, social platforms aren't fickle: they are usually incredibly sticky (see the huge number of forums that have been running for 10+ years). Most people just look at the "social network" category and see how Friendster/MySpace/Bebo/Hi5/etc all got destroyed by the Facebook juggernaut.
They never talk about the success of LinkedIn/PInterest/Twitter/Reddit/etc.
In every case, those overran competitors of their own (including Facebook in some cases) to dominate their categories.
That's not "fickle", that is platform strategy and product development.
There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.
MySpace sold to News Ltd, and then went downhill. Maybe Twitter won't sell itself to a company that is actively internet-hostile. But yes, you are correct: potentially any company could fail.
[+] [-] shawnee_|13 years ago|reply
Interesting take. Seems almost exactly the opposite to me. What makes Twitter valuable is not the "eyeballs," or even the infrastructure, but rather the pulse of content. It had what essentially amounted to first-mover advantage in the sphere of mobile content, and that is why none of the Twitter clones have been able to take its place.
That said, this direction Twitter is going toward "more closed" is wrong. Given that it's the market-researcher's goldmine of content that makes Twitter valuable, disallowing developers the ability to build infrastructure on top of that content seems really stupid. Raw data is not useful; the organizing of, packaging and presenting of that data is where the business value can be (profitably) delivered. It can be profitable for both Twitter and developers.
[+] [-] nikcub|13 years ago|reply
This couldn't be further from the truth, and the thousands of copycat networks, not least from Google, are proof that networks can't be commoditized.
The only reason I am still on GitHub, Facebook, hn, reddit and Twitter - despite there being better 'products' and 'infrastructure'- is because everybody else is, and the same applies to them.
[+] [-] potatolicious|13 years ago|reply
The problem with Twitter is the same problem that plagues innumerable startups - they've built a product without even once thinking about the business model, and are not scrambling for revenue.
Inexorably, everything they do in the pursuit of revenue is going to involve making the product worse for users. Ad injection, loss of 3rd-party apps that support the ecosystem, all of that is just example after example of how a business with no built-in monetization will eventually cannibalize itself in the pursuit of revenue.
[+] [-] BerislavLopac|13 years ago|reply
I think this is the most important point, one that most people -- Twitter included -- seem to overlook or ignore.
What we need is an open Twitter-like protocol -- but for it to be successful it should be peer-to-peer, not server-based like Twitter. A few year ago I was working on a startup which would build precisely such a protocol, but my partners backed out before we could lift anything off ground.
One of ideas was to make the client double as a Twitter client, in order to attract a wider user base. This would be less viable now, with the new Twitter API restrictions, but I would still love to see someone develop something like that.
[+] [-] alphang|13 years ago|reply
You have an interesting point about commoditization, however. It makes me think about the IM space and all the different services there.
As for eyeballs, I think a Twitter competitor can do what media companies do — pay for certain celebrities, authors, speakers to move their microblog to their service — do a few of those, and you'll start to have an audience.
[+] [-] Tichy|13 years ago|reply
Is there anything preventing any social network from becoming the next MySpace? Seems to me it is all in the users, if the users leave you are the next MySpace. I don't see how you could force users not to leave?
[+] [-] andrewfelix|13 years ago|reply
Do you think perhaps restricting 3rd party clients is a way to make them more appealing to a potential buyer like Apple?
[+] [-] potatolicious|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thought_alarm|13 years ago|reply
Whenever I get fed up with the complextiy of Facebook or Google+ I'll load up Twitter on an old Apple II, via TTYtter and a serial connection; I'll watch the green text scroll along at 1200 baud and think about how this one simple, geeky text service, pure as a 1980s BBS, somehow made it, worldwide, in 2012.
And now they're hellbent on ruining all of that. Fuck Twitter.
[+] [-] AVTizzle|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joering2|13 years ago|reply
I say when twitter was still this little chick, their approach was "we love all users, we welcome engineers; build amazing tools and surprise us!". I think the reason for that was to speed up the process of spreading the word - a simple fact that geek working on twitter 3rd party is still a human with plenty of friends to spread the word about twitter - so he can be helpful: let him spend his time doing what he likes doing the best - programming and he will become our cheap (free) PR tube.
But now I bet most of a new age civilization knows or uses twitter. So it is time for a reality check: "fuck off of our platform; we don't need you anymore! You got all your friends to know twitter, some even addict to it; now stay away from trying to run your pathetic queries, using our own data stream".
Just my version/2c.
edit: my understanding is that Dorsey still has the most to say in the twitter world. With all its nastiness going on between twitter curtain, I say stay the hell far away from any startup he will do in the future. Sorry, but if he signs up half of the world on his square, what on Earth is stopping him from switching 2.5% to 10% fee?? nothing!! At least the past (present) shows he has the balls to execute moves that average tweeting Joe is not a fan of: shutting down 3rd parties, kicking out linkedin, shutting down instagram access, etc. Bottom line: stay away!
[+] [-] fauigerzigerk|13 years ago|reply
Twitter got the funding to build that massive infrastructure only because someone believed that they would eventually be able to monetize it. Twitter is not a public utility and everyone knew it.
The conclusion isn't to never use something one particular guy does. The conclusion is this: If you build on someone elses infrastructure, make a contract or make sure you exit before the tide turns.
[+] [-] pedalpete|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirkules|13 years ago|reply
What is the business advantage of Twitter (or Facebook, or what-have-you) releasing a free, public API to anyone who asks, and how did they plan to monetize it when it got popular? You can't build your business model around "here, use my service for free" and not have a plan how to convert either the users of the 3rd party developers' software or the 3rd party developers themselves into paying customers (or monetize on that somehow, i.e. mining data, selling ads, etc). Maybe I'm just being naive -- I honestly don't have much experience dealing with these sorts of things, so I would love it if someone could break it down.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|13 years ago|reply
If a business idea requires free use of other people's services then think of another idea.
[+] [-] stephenlovell|13 years ago|reply
However, there's another area that has gotten me wondering, non-app, non-client based websites using the API, in reference to the Display Guidelines..er Rules.
This is the bit specifically.
"Users must have a consistent experience wherever they interact with Tweets, whether on Twitter.com, a mobile client, website, or in an application developed with the Twitter API"
So lets say that I go to GitHub and grab a little jQuery plugin to pull in my tweets on my personal portfolio. Does that also mean I have to make sure I include my own avatar, my username, Tweet actions, and twitter branding, among other things? What if those elements are unnecessary to the design or intention of what I'm doing on the site?
And then there's the fact that all of these jQuery plugins are going to have to start implementing authenticated access (if they weren't already, which many seem to not be.) I don't have access to data on the matter, but I would surmise that there's a significant number of personal and portfolio sites out there pulling in tweets that are either not authenticated, or are modifying the tweet display in some way. All the ones I've interacted with have settings for turning avatar display on or off, or unlinking hash tags or links, etc.
Thoughts?
[+] [-] maxpow4h|13 years ago|reply
It needs to be Open Source so anyone can run it and everyone owns their data.
It needs to be compatible with current Twitter apps so all it requires is setting the API root.
It needs to be distributed so anyone can follow anyone anywhere. There is no owner or root, there is no place to shut down.
Proof of concept: https://nstatus.herokuapp.com
Source: https://github.com/maxpow4h/nekomimi
I wrote about the requirements of it here: http://maxpow4h.com/blog/twitter/
edit: you can use any username with any password to sign in to nstatus. It then uses that password for your username. You can even do this from the official iOS Twitter app, just sign in.
[+] [-] lloydwatkin|13 years ago|reply
- open-source - open-standards - free - federated
Keep your own data, talk with whoever you wish.
Built on XMPP and actively contributed to by a great group of developers (admission: I am on of these developers).
When you join up you can find me at [email protected]
[+] [-] seagreen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steko|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lancewiggs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjsamson|13 years ago|reply
As an aside, I feel even better about backing App.net after seeing this news.
[+] [-] jsilence|13 years ago|reply
We need open protocols and a decentralized social network where we have different implementations with focus on different use cases which are still able to communicate with one another.
A good chunk of the protocols and implementations is already there with OAuth, Activity streams, salmon, RSS and such. And there are already open sourced implementations like status.net and others alike.
The solution is already there. We only need to start using it.
[+] [-] mmaunder|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btipling|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ziadbc|13 years ago|reply
Theres no way to stop you from building one anyway, twitter knows that. If you go against their rules, you're a revolutionary, and if you win that revolution, they'll have to deal with you.
You can't expect however, that the incumbent is going to go around encouraging revolutions against themselves.
The only alternative is to encourage everyone to make clients, at which point, they're just a big cloud xmpp server to the world.
[+] [-] uptown|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eric-hu|13 years ago|reply
Twitter bootstrap, on the other hand, is something they built for themselves to reduce the friction of creating rich, consistent UIs. Developing it is a sunk cost. Offering it free to the world should cost them nothing as it's hosted on Github [1].
Like others in this thread, I lament that Twitter has become less egalitarian. Moving forward, developers with one idea of usage will have more Twitter clout than developers with "lesser" ideas, but Twitter has bills to pay and investors to answer to. It's far from an ideal world, but I can't offer them a better solution for their problems.
[1] https://github.com/plans/ all plans offer 'unlimited public repos'
[+] [-] ricardobeat|13 years ago|reply
Translation: so that we can charge even light API users.
This will surely backfire - some services will switch from API usage to screen-scraping, resulting in an even higher load on twitter's servers.
[+] [-] virmundi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sequoia|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwa|13 years ago|reply
Most people building products or sharecropping on other people's platform never make meaningful income and yet those platform keep will prefer to announce large sums paid out to developers to encourage you to keep building complements. Apple will claim they paid out $5 billion but spread the numerous app developers it becomes peanut and not enough to pay their bills. They won't tell you that to pay out $5bn they made atleast $2billion based on their 30% cut.
They don't tell you that iOS app success is a "lottery": 60% (or more) of developers don't break even
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lo...
http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-fail...
I really hope people will think hard before building their business on the back of Apple, Facebook, Twitter or any such platform. You can use them as as distribution without being dependent on them and that is the way to go.
Be your own bitch and not a Twitter, Apple or Facebook bitch:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewfelix|13 years ago|reply
This maybe true for a lot of tweets. But my stream is filled with live updates of interesting stuff from around the world.
Twitter has been instrumental in getting news out of war zones for example.
[+] [-] ianstormtaylor|13 years ago|reply
Surprised they didn't try to make it a bit less obvious.
[+] [-] voyou|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] countessa|13 years ago|reply
Seems to me that developers are getting all pissy because they can't have free reign to a platform that isn't even theirs. Perhaps, at the end of the day, Twitter doesn't care - they don't need the developers as early adopters anymore and it must be a fair old strain to keep the api infrastructure supporting them when the resources could be more profitably used building something else inside the company.
[+] [-] andrewfelix|13 years ago|reply
app.net suddenly looks more attractive.
[+] [-] efsavage|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] littlejim84|13 years ago|reply