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).
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:
> "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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It would have been if you assume that Twitter could thrive on its own. Since they have historically relied on third parties to push their product forward, and then cut them off at the knee, they should have been prepared for the inevitable stagnation that followed, and perhaps they weren't.
The masterful move would have been to carefully augment the base functionality offered by Twitter while encouraging the third-party ecosystem to continue to grow and thrive.
You can see, for example, Apple do this with iOS (albeit at times with a ham-fisted approach) by incorporating some—but by no means all—of the features that third parties come up with into the base OS.
This encourages third parties to continue to participate in the ecosystem while gently nudging them towards innovating instead of stagnating, because that's the only way they will be able to compete with the “free” Apple-provided software and make money.
Twitter was in the somewhat unfortunate position that it was born as a wide-open system that had little in the way of walls, leaving the new management with few options to gain more control over their product but to start restricting what could be done with it.
Instead of recognizing the value of third-parties and commoditizing their complements, though, they went all-out and systematically alienated anyone who wanted to share in their good fortunes. They placed their focus on attracting celebrities and brands (remember when Ev was “excited” that Oprah was joining?) and attempted to create a friendly environment for the average consumer by tightly controlling the user experience.
In itself, I don't think that this is a bad idea—Facebook has done it quite successfully, for example. Twitter's problem is simply that they are about to run out of innovation to acquire because there are no more small timers left who are willing and capable to take a risk on their platform and come up with some unexpected new feature that could later be integrated into product proper.
Like App.net?[1][2] It would seem you need much more than just being open and "letting third parties do the hard work of experimenting with user acquisition and engagement" to succeed in this space.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
These us vs. them statements regarding MBAs on HN are ridiculous. And your broad generalization of MBAs as technologically inept is ridiculous as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[+] [-] galfarragem|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
Encouraging everyone to make constant, short, pithy, public pronouncements is not a recipe for thoughtful conversation.
[+] [-] basch|11 years ago|reply
twitter can be a noisy firehose, and facebook can be delightfully refined.
take a look at two of my interest lists on facebook.
http://i.imgur.com/LRK7Wi9.png (the left column is this list http://i.imgur.com/BCkOXCN.png)
if you have noise problems it s because you follow noisy sources, which is true of both platforms.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teh_klev|11 years ago|reply
https://archive.is/CkEn8
[+] [-] schnelle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laumars|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CouscousPmplmss|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveklabnik|11 years ago|reply
Long story short: network effects are hard.
[+] [-] debacle|11 years ago|reply
And amazingly not profitable.
[+] [-] serve_yay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarrel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UVB-76|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mtabini|11 years ago|reply
It would have been if you assume that Twitter could thrive on its own. Since they have historically relied on third parties to push their product forward, and then cut them off at the knee, they should have been prepared for the inevitable stagnation that followed, and perhaps they weren't.
The masterful move would have been to carefully augment the base functionality offered by Twitter while encouraging the third-party ecosystem to continue to grow and thrive.
You can see, for example, Apple do this with iOS (albeit at times with a ham-fisted approach) by incorporating some—but by no means all—of the features that third parties come up with into the base OS.
This encourages third parties to continue to participate in the ecosystem while gently nudging them towards innovating instead of stagnating, because that's the only way they will be able to compete with the “free” Apple-provided software and make money.
Twitter was in the somewhat unfortunate position that it was born as a wide-open system that had little in the way of walls, leaving the new management with few options to gain more control over their product but to start restricting what could be done with it.
Instead of recognizing the value of third-parties and commoditizing their complements, though, they went all-out and systematically alienated anyone who wanted to share in their good fortunes. They placed their focus on attracting celebrities and brands (remember when Ev was “excited” that Oprah was joining?) and attempted to create a friendly environment for the average consumer by tightly controlling the user experience.
In itself, I don't think that this is a bad idea—Facebook has done it quite successfully, for example. Twitter's problem is simply that they are about to run out of innovation to acquire because there are no more small timers left who are willing and capable to take a risk on their platform and come up with some unexpected new feature that could later be integrated into product proper.
[+] [-] frostmatthew|11 years ago|reply
Like App.net?[1][2] It would seem you need much more than just being open and "letting third parties do the hard work of experimenting with user acquisition and engagement" to succeed in this space.
[1] https://github.com/appdotnet/alpha
[2] https://alpha.app.net/
[+] [-] sp332|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dublinben|11 years ago|reply
Like GNUSocial and Pumpio? What's your handle?
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nkozyra|11 years ago|reply
This is nothing new, and another tale of caution for people building companies that entirely rely on another company's good graces and policies.
[+] [-] mmahemoff|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] fooyc|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adventured|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] micheljansen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiosgc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flurdy|11 years ago|reply
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_fir...
http://blog.datasift.com/2015/04/11/twitter-ends-its-partner...
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-...
[+] [-] mattzito|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pmontra|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] watson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobAley|11 years ago|reply
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8jwimQ6...
[+] [-] flurdy|11 years ago|reply
He has reposted it on medium: https://medium.com/@mathewi/twitter-s-multi-billion-dollar-m...
Could someone update the URL to that please?
[+] [-] detaro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datashovel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nicholas_C|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevebot|11 years ago|reply
...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|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x0x0|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jusben1369|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digitalzombie|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jcfrei|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] discardorama|11 years ago|reply
By becoming an ad network! That's the logical conclusion of all such endeavors in the Valley. :-)
[+] [-] feraloink|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathewi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnull2guest|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdhe|11 years ago|reply