
Twitter sets max user caps for 3rd party clients and limits rates - rkudeshi
http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/
======
danilocampos
Basic truth: New technology is driven by early adopters, who then influence
their less tech-savvy pals. Happened with Google, happened with the iPhone,
and it happened with Twitter.

So now that the obvious is out of the way – we'll look back one day and see
this as the day Twitter fucked the dog.

They've made a decision that motivates the very core of early adopters who
embraced Twitter to move on.

Yeah, they have to make money. They've convinced themselves the experience
must be entirely under their control to do it. Okay. And maybe that's so.

And maybe they'll squeeze some pennies out for awhile.

In the meantime, there's a group of folks who first jumped into Twitter during
the days where you weren't chained to their mediocre user products. They'll
start the move to a better network.

And one day, everyone will look around and see all that's left on Twitter is
the glitter gif morons and big brands with more money than sense, just as
happened with MySpace.

~~~
pkulak
MySpace didn't die because they pissed off the early adopter geeks. They
pissed off everyone. And everyone left. If Twitter just becomes the place
where hundreds of millions of people follow hundreds of celebrities while also
looking at ads, I think they're okay with that.

~~~
citricsquid
I don't think Myspace pissed anyone off, it was more that their product didn't
make any sense. In my experience people didn't leave Myspace for Facebook
because they "hated Myspace", they left because Facebook was a better product
that met their needs.

I don't think Twitter should be concerned unless someone builds a better
product.

~~~
danilocampos
> I don't think Twitter should be concerned unless someone builds a better
> product.

Which is inevitable. Their clients are crappy, otherwise there wouldn't be a
third-party ecosystem to piss off in the first place.

Which means their only defense is network effects.

Which means it's probably a bad idea to motivate all your early adopters to
find and grow the network that unseats you.

~~~
citricsquid
I think you're really underestimating the value that "normal people" provide
to Twitter, I would bet that the majority of Twitter users (that are active)
are not "early adopters", but "normal people" that follow celebrities and talk
to their friends. I left high school a few years back and the majority of my
Facebook friends are ~19-20, almost all of them use Twitter and not a single
one could write a line of code in any programming language, nor could they
give a damn about whether or not Twitter is open to developers.

Take a look at the Twitter trends list if you want proof that Twitter caters
more to "normal people" than it does "technology" people, here's the #1 trend
as I type this: <http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23NameATurnOn>

Yes, their only defense is their network (which is, in my opinion, their
"product"), but the majority of their network is not going to leave because of
their developer relations. Twitter are safe as long as an alternative doesn't
exist and they provide value to their users.

Twitter aren't stupid, they're not going to be enacting this plan if the
majority of their users use third party clients. I suspect the majority of
people that do use third party clients are those using "value adding" third
party clients, like Hootsuite, and those that use Hootsuite are the people
that get value from Twitter's network (for example marketing people) so if
Hootsuite shuts down they're not going to quit Twitter, they're going to move
to an official client.

~~~
w1ntermute
If the percentage of 3rd party client users are small, then why would they
even bother enacting this change in the first place?

> Twitter aren't stupid

Oh come on, that's not an argument. There have been countless examples
throughout history of companies (in tech and otherwise) that have done stupid
things that have directly contributed to their demise. There's no reason to
assume that Twitter won't end up like them.

~~~
citricsquid
Small as a percentage is still millions and millions of people and tens of
millions of requests.

------
aaronbrethorst
Wow, fuck you very much, Twitter. I really wish this had happened when App.net
was still raising their $500k. Even though I still don't think App.net will
work out, I would've still chipped in out of spite towards Twitter.

This is ridiculous, and I'm going to figure out how to get out as soon as
possible.

edit: I put my money where my mouth is, as it were:

    
    
        Success!
    
        Thank you for joining App.net!
    
        You will receive an email confirmation to complete the signup process.
    
        Your plan is Developer Tier for $100 per year.
    
        You're in line to join the alpha with username: @aaronbrethorst.

~~~
abraham
App.net got over $800k in funding and still has a large amount left from
picplz. As Dalton put it at last nights AirBnB tech talk, they have an
"infinite amount of time" for a startup. As in several years at their current
burn rate.

~~~
illicium
1 week to write a Twitter clone, several years to blog about it.

~~~
jordanthoms
They can just use the rails tutorial, right? :-)

------
ctide
Congratulations Dalton Caldwell!

Who could have known that Twitter would just hand you the entire game with one
stupid maneuver.

~~~
dm8
It makes things harder for developers. But it doesn't affect end-user at all.
Twitter already has eye balls, celebrity users. Average joe doesn't care if
Twitter has 100k user cap for third party client. End-user experience is
getting better day by day. Ask someone who is not tech savvy is on Twitter.

~~~
jonursenbach
Users will care then their favorite application no longer works.

~~~
dm8
They will curse the application developer and choose the next best
application. In this case, it will be Twitter.

------
pavel_lishin
Please read the original article. This very unfairly summarizes the actual
blogpost.

The limit isn't 60 hits per hour. It's 60 hits per hour per endpoint, and only
for some endpoints.

The user limit is 1 million users for certain api endpoints, and 100k for
others - and if you need more than that, they would like you to reach out to
them.

Oh, and also, all current clients are grandfathered into the old terms.

Please examine the bandwagon carefully before jumping on it.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
From <https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api>:

"If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens,
you'll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you
reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you
comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user
token count, you'll be able to maintain your application to serve your users,
but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission."

Translation: 'Fuck you, 3rd party Twitter clients.' They'll still cut them off
at the knees when they hit _at most_ 200,000 users.

Edit: I kept reading the blog post and it got better:

 _That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, "traditional" Twitter
clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave
developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or
reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience." And to reiterate
what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today._

In other words, 3rd party Twitter clients are dead. Not today, but next year
they're dead as a doorknob.

Edit 2: Thanks for the clarification on the '200%' thing. I think the net
result is still about the same for Twitter clients in the end. They'll be
EOL'd by their developers and increasingly ignored by users.

~~~
rlivsey

        Translation: 'Fuck you, 3rd party Twitter clients.' 
        They'll still cut them off at the knees when they hit 
        at most 200,000 users.
    

Nitpick - it's 200% of what they're at now, so if they currently have a
million users they're good for up to 2 million.

------
zethraeus
It's rather frightening that the _only_ example that they give of a user
facing service in the appropriate 'quadrant' is Klout.

~~~
ceejayoz
Good: Klout

Bad: Tweetbot, Storify

What is this, Opposite Day? That stopped being fun in kindergarten.

------
rksprst
In the tweet display guidelines: "No other social or 3rd party actions may be
attached to a Tweet." <https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-guidelines>

Wonder if that means 3rd party apps can't add actions to tweets like "assign
to a user", "translate", "schedule a reply", etc. That might just kill major
functionality for apps like HootSuite, CoTweet, Radian6's Engagement Console.

Or, since it's under the guidelines for individual tweets, are tweets in the
timeline excluded from that limitation?

~~~
whamill
Tweets in a timeline, on the Twitter feed in the web client, all have the
retweet/quote/reply/favourite actions per-tweet so I would expect that they
mean each and every tweet displayed anywhere.

------
ljd
"It is also limiting the rate on its API per end-point, meaning that most
individual clients will be limited to 60 calls per hour instead of 350 calls
per hour. "

If you can't raise revenue, reduce expenses. That cut is significant enough to
reduce their rate of growth of monthly expenses but probably not enough to
reduce their rate of user growth. Probably not a bad move for them.

With press releases like this Twitter is App.net's new best friend.

~~~
gjulianm
<i>Most individual API endpoints will be rate limited at 60 calls per hour
per-endpoint. Based on analysis of current use of our API, this rate limit
will be well above the needs of most applications built against the Twitter
API, while protecting our systems from abusive applications.

There will be a set of high-volume endpoints related to Tweet display, profile
display, user lookup and user search where applications will be able to make
up to 720 calls per hour per endpoint.</i>

60 calls per hour are only for certain endpoints, probably creating lists,
tweeting... It's really rare that an user uses so much of this kind of
resources. The endpoints that are used the more (viewing tweets, look up an
user, etc) are actually less limited than before.

~~~
kmfrk
Maybe they just hate the crazed Bieber, Glee, and Twilight fans out there with
over 20k tweets to their name like the rest of us. :)

It could suck for live-tweeting events, though.

------
waterlesscloud
Remember the Great Twitter Strategy Document Leak of 2009?

[http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-
strategy-...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-
laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet-2/)

What happened to those plans? They seemed so smart...

~~~
aaronbrethorst
New management, new strategy.

------
_lex
Twitter is making it very unappealing to build on their platform, since
developers have to effectively give up a large chunk of autonomy and trust
that Twitter's business model won't change again, and that Twitter won't
suddenly start competing with them. And anyone who's paying attention knows
that that's exactly what Twitter will do, since they don't have a clear,
believable business model, and they've done it(destroyed their 'developers')
before.

------
guelo
I use Twitter via their official apps, I have tried some of the third party
apps but haven't really been impressed. After all this time it didn't seem
like the app ecosystem was coming up with anything really innovative besides
slightly different ways of organizing the feeds.

~~~
dustyreagan
That's because they bought the cool third party apps like the TweetDeck and
Tweetie, and have since begun shunning third party developers. In short, the
official apps were third party apps, and now no one wants to make any
additional Twitter apps because Twitter has become hostile to developers.
They've closed the door on third party inovation for their platform.

~~~
masklinn
> like the TweetDeck and Tweetie

Don't you mean Tweetbot or something? Tweetie was bought by Twitter, rebranded
to be the official Twitter client, and in no small part gutted and left to rot
(gutted for the mobile version, left to rot for the desktop one).

~~~
RKearney
>> That's because they bought the cool third party apps like the TweetDeck and
Tweetie

>Tweetie was bought by Twitter

That's what they said. I think you misread that post.

------
fudged71
I finally got really into Twitter this year. Sad to see them being so
restrictive with their platform. Maybe App.Net isn't such a bad idea after
all.

It's amazing how poor the first party clients for Facebook and Twitter are
compared to the functionality and rate of development on 3rd party apps. Maybe
paying to be a part of a less restrictive network will be worth it in the end.
I just hope they can get a big following with a bunch of apps integrated with
it.

------
px1999
I'm having trouble trying to figure out who Twitter's trying to target with
these changes - and can't figure out if:

1\. They want to corner the advertiser & business market - ie it's an attack
on Hootsuite etc

2\. They want to lock out competitors from pwning them on search (Google/Bing
incorporating [good] twitter results into their searches would IMO be
devastating to twitter - particularly if they didn't embed intents / hueg
links to twitter everywhere)

3\. They want to own the ecosystem so that twitter clients don't cross-post to
Facebook/G+/app.net/favourite social network here

4\. (I don't think this is likely) - Twitter thinking that they can somehow
squeeze an extra couple of bucks out of each user if they're on an official
client via advertising or something similar.

.

Each of these seems plausible to me, but all of them essentially involve
twitter holding customers/data/users hostage which doesn't seem like a great
strategy.

Is there some angle I'm missing here / reading too much into?

~~~
jchung
I was also trying to figure out the business rationale for this move. Their
2x2 chart gets us relatively close to understanding their strategy. Here's
what it looks like:

\- Twitter doesn't want to own analytics for business or consumer players. \-
Twitter doesn't want to own engagement for businesses. \- Twitter DOES want to
own engagement for consumers.

This seems pretty counter-intuitive to me. Since businesses are the ones who
actually pay twitter cash, I would have expected them to try to own the whole
left side of their chart, and leave developers to create new innovations for
the whole right side of the chart. What would you have to believe in order for
this to be a good idea? Some possibilities: \- Twitter thinks that developers
will ruin the consumer experience, slowing their growth. \- Twitter thinks
that businesses won't pay them unless consumers are tweeting on twitter.com \-
Twitter doesn't think that analytics or business engagement services will be
lucrative enough for them to invest directly in. \- Twitter thinks that if the
developer community spends its effort in the top-right, it will distract the
community from innovating in the other three quadrants, where Twitter wants to
see more development to unlock more business-driven revenues (This one is a
_real_ longshot, but I'm trying to be comprehensive) \- Twitter doesn't care
about users tweeting or consuming tweets if they aren't on twitter.com (I'm
still struggling to figure out why this is bad for twitter -- any thoughts,
HN?)

------
jot
How would you feel if Google announced that you could only access their
services using Chrome? What does it take to activate the antitrust lawyers?

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I wonder if "antitrust" and "monopoly" talk are HN forms of Godwin's Law.

Before Twitter would be remotely concerned about antitrust, there would have
to not be a place with more users that you can talk about your cat's lunch to
your heart's content. Facebook has more to fear than Twitter does.

------
mhartl
This is the kind of thing that happens when you don't have a business model.

------
dave_sullivan
I wonder if a p2p twitter would be possible. I guess there would be real
storage/timeliness issues, but twitter always struck me as more rss
replacement than anything else, and I'm not sure it makes sense to have
something like that run by one company.

I think twitter is a cool concept/application, but I'm not sure it will ever
be a great _business_.

~~~
runn1ng
I have a genius idea how to make a p2p pseudo-twitter which I have shared with
only one person yet, but why not share it now on HN (maybe someone can build
it instead of me, since I don't have the time at the moment because of school
stuff).

Basically, what you need to solve in something like p2p twitter is: how to
authentificate the user, how to send the message around, how to archive the
message that it is not lost.

Now the genius idea: all of this is _exactly_ what bitcoin solves.

Bitcoin already has mechanisms for authenticating. Bitcoin already has
mechanisms for sharing messages (altough it is called "transactions"). Bitcoin
has a mechanism for archiving those messages (it's called "blockchain").

And the kicker - bitcoin already has an ability to enter arbitrary data into
the transaction. (sure, not much, but about the 160 letters tweets have.) You
just add it into the script and add OP_DROP; since the transaction including
script is signed, noone can just remove it.

My idea was to hijack the already existing bitcoin infrastructure and hack
Twitter-like P2P messaging thing on top of it; let's call it "bitmessage".

How would sending a "bitmessage" look like? Well, you can, for example, send
money from your address to the same address (send money to yourself) and add
the wanted string into the script.

You can then look for a message of a given user (if you take bitcoin address
as an ID of the user).

Now of course, this wouldn't be free for long (if it catched up). Right now,
bitcoin miners take just anything the P2P network throws at them, but if the
network was flooded with people sending money to themselves with a message in
script, they would just throw these away so it doesn't enlarge the already
giant blockchain. However, you can add fees to any transaction. If you add
fees high enough, some block miner will eventually take your "bitmessage" and
add it to the blockchain.

Would the resulting thing be equivalent of twitter? No, it would be slow (it
takes about 10 minutes to get transaction to blockchain) and it would most
likely not be for free (if it catches on, miners will throw away the messages
with low fees). On the other hand, every message would be recorded _forever_ ,
without _any_ chance of anyone deleting it, censoring it or getting your IP
address. Also, the Bitcoin seems to be going strong and doesn't seem like it
will go away any time soon, and the infrastructure is super-strong.

I want to hack a prototype... maybe... one day.

~~~
lukeholder
Just a tip. When you start a sentence with "I have a genius idea" people will
not think it's a genius idea; or at least judge your comments to an
unreasonably high standard of your own creation.

~~~
runn1ng
well, I didn't mean it _that_ seriously, but thanks

------
state
It seems to me that the kinds of applications they are trying to prevent from
existing are precisely the ones that they could learn the most from and could
provide them with the most new users.

I also don't see how this action actually wins them that many more eyes. Are
there really that many third party Twitter apps out there?

------
jmathai
I anticipate a flurry of parodies on their use of the term "flock" except away
from Twitter and not towards.

------
WALoeIII
There could be a revenue stream in here. They're limiting how many free users
an application may have, but I would expect they could charge Tweetbot to have
more users. Tweetbot could simply build this cost into the software.

------
jonknee
I have seen a lot more pushes trying to get me to advertise lately (tons of
sponsored tweets). I wonder if this is related to their revenue push--knock
out their competitors and lower API costs.

------
DigitalSea
Can you smell that? It's the smell of victory, the smell of Dalton Caldwell
lighting a Cuban cigar in celebration of Twitter driving basically every
single 3rd party developer over to App.net.

------
fufulabs
This removes their duality of being a media / service play. This is highly
beneficial to Twitter itself as well as to a new service/platform aiming to be
a pure microblogging piping service. The only loser here are the Twitter app
developers and startups which are faced with a now limited channel to promote
their apps.

~~~
dannygarcia
I don't see how this benefits Twitter.

A large amount of users rely solely on a dedicated third party client. If
those apps lose the ability to provide the same reliable service, then Twitter
(as a platform) will also be affected.

~~~
danilocampos
"Only" 23% of users.

Still, I could see the argument that some users are better than others and the
most engaged ones are more likely to get a third party client.

Which means either Twitter loses those users eventually or coerces them into
using their first-party offerings.

------
imrehg
I really want to like Twitter, I really do. So many possibilities, so many
interesting services built on top of them, it would be a great centre for
"online identity", a main front to communicate with friends and audience.

Except when they do these kinds of things, and I wonder how on Earth it makes
any sense besides "because we can"?

------
ashbrahma
Anyone know how to check the number of users that have authenticated the apps
on the twitter dev portal?

~~~
abraham
Currently you can't. They used to show those numbers but dropped it, I think,
for scaling issues a long while ago. Maybe Twitter will bring it back.

------
bane
So why are they doing this? My guess is to drive users to their clients, so
that they can start displaying ads and gather revenue. 3rd party clients won't
display Twitter's own ads so there's no way for the service to collect on
that.

------
mehulkar
Winter is coming.

~~~
dm8
Which winter are you talking about? Twitter has been tightening the strings
for a while now.

------
moe
R.I.P. Twitter

*06/2006 †08/2012

------
galactus
I guess twitter thinks it is big enough to stop worrying about pissing third
party developers off. In the short term it probably won't hurt them much.

------
chj
If you are develop!ng for every s!ngle platform on th!s planet today, you are
e!ther f!!ked or wa!t!ng to be f!!ked. Un!ted, developers!

------
mikecane
With the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini coming up, I wonder if the projections of new
users from those influenced this decision?

------
Tichy
Well I am out of there first chance I see...

~~~
jcoder
What's stopping you now?

~~~
Tichy
Where should I go to? Status.net somehow didn't deliver, although I guess I
could reevaluate. I think what was missing back then was mirroring Twitter -
my tweets were sent to Twitter, but I didn't get the Tweets from the people I
followed on Twitter.

------
ukd1
Hello App.net.

