
OAuthcalypse -- freakishly self-destructive Twitter insanity - idiginous
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/26/theToxicCoralReef.html
======
blasdel

      That's why RSS is frozen. No developer should (or can) code against a moving
      target. RSS has been in the same place for a long time and look at all that has
      developed around it. If we kept changing our minds about how it worked,
      eventually it would have amounted to nothing. But no one had the power to make
      those changes, despite how much people complained -- so it stayed put.
      This is what works.
    

Lies, bullshit, projection, and blatant hypocrisy is par for the course with
Dave Winer. He repeatedly edited the 'frozen' spec documents incompatibly
without changing the version number. A good introduction:
<http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss>

He's one of the worst spec writers _of all time_ , responsible for other epic
fuckups like OPML, XML-RPC, and SOAP.

------
cmelbye
Seriously? Quit complaining! Developers have known about this for _months_ and
the date has _always_ been in June 2010 (as far as I'm aware). Any problems
occurring because of the switch are 100% because of the developer's poor
planning.

~~~
hga
Or lack of interest; from the posting: " _When Twitter breaks all the apps in
the OAuthcalypse, they will break all of mine, and I have no intention of
fixing them._ "

I have to say that I got a bad impression of Dave Winer late last decade when
he posted a private email of mine on his blog without asking. And in our back
and forth he mentioned how he was quite confused about people being upset by
his habit of doing this....

ADDED: I wasn't too upset, except that he wasn't cooperative about my desire
to edit it for public consumption.

~~~
idiginous
What was the email about? Do you have a pointer? Why didn't you want it
published? Did you say in the email it was private? Was it in response to
something public? Was it abusive?

~~~
hga
It was about the broader issues illuminated by an AGIS/Conxion peering
conflict that prevented a number of people from accessing his web site in
October 1997.

I didn't want it published "as is" since it wasn't written for public
consumption. There were personal details that detracted from the message,
adjustments I wanted to tone down some of the rhetoric and some people
(sources) who I referred to who needed better credit and/or real links.

I didn't say it was private, but in some of it I was "talking" directly to
him. And it was certainly netiquette at the time that email was by default
private; he said that was "crap", that he'd gone over this issue "countless
times", that "off the record" was a privilege that had to be negotiated ahead
of time and that he was "being very generous" in offering to delete it.

That message from him left a rather bad taste in my mouth.

My email was in response this public posting on his blog, start with the 4th
paragraph of this page: <http://www.scripting.com/1997/10/16.html>

It wasn't abusive, although it was harsh on some bad players of the era, like
UUNET, e.g. their actions prompted the editor of _Boardwatch_ to commission a
cover depicting the head of UUNET planting blue barrels of ANFO in MAE-East
and I think MAE-West, referring to the OK City bombing a couple of years
earlier.

The general issue of the day as I put it in my email:

" _[T]he ISPs that are refusing to peer with others on equal terms are
basically no longer offering Internet connectivity, but are instead offering a
private network that happens to be connected to parts of the Internet. As I
like to describe it, their unique selling proposition is "sign up with us, and
we'll connect you to a steadily smaller portion of the Internet"._ "

UUNET's dominance at that time allowed them to play this sort of game and we
still see it occasionally when a low cost provider irritates another. The end
result of these power plays as I said at the time was "paying customers of the
disconnecting ISP demand full connectivity or take their business elsewhere",
although obviously that was a lot easier in the dialup era.

------
BSeward
This change provides an added benefit of cleaning up the Twitter app
ecosystem. Twitter is changing, and if an app developer won't make this change
they probably wouldn't ever be inspired to update their app to use new
features^, and users would go elsewhere (in this case sooner rather than
later).

^ Single-use apps--visualizations come to mind--deserve a pass. They do one
neat thing and don't necessarily need to grow and evolve outside their niche.
I'm sure one app or another will be missed.

~~~
Tichy
Ah, the iPhone argument. What if an app simply doesn't need constant updates
and a recurring flood of new features? What are we, a society of update
junkies? Some apps are simply there to do something useful, not for showing
off new features.

------
wrs
I think Dave is confused about the difference between a protocol like RSS with
many producers and consumers (very hard to change, just look at SMTP!), and a
service API like Twitter's with a single producer (it changes, some apps die
that were unsupported already, big deal).

"None will make it through this transition without being reconceived."

Say what? I can't imagine many apps will require _reconcieving_ because an
authorization API changed.

------
enntwo
It is mindsets like his that destroy and stagnate langauges, and fill them
with bloat to support outdated legacy code.

I don't see why anyone should be truly content with a platform or environment
that refuses to evolve, progress will obviously cause breaking changes, but in
the far majority of cases, the resulting fix will improve the existing
application.

If someone is too lazy to take the chance to improve an application of their
own, then they truly don't care about it in the first place, but then again if
they are statisfied with the stagnation of their entire platofrm and
environment, it makes sense that they would be statisfied with the stagnation
of their own programs as well.

Software evolves, poor programmers complain and resist, good programmers go
with the flow, but great programmers embrace this.

------
aaronbrethorst
I'm surprised no one has mentioned his freakout over JSON, yet
([http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/26/theToxicCoralRee...](http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/26/theToxicCoralReef.html#p8)).
Apparently, Twitter turning off XML output and standardizing on JSON is "even
more dramatic" than the Basic Auth-to-OAuth transition.

Frankly, I don't get it. Dave's argument appears to be that because the
tooling he uses (Radio Userland?) doesn't support JSON, and therefore he will
stop writing tools for Twitter (he wrote Twitter-related tools?).

He's the only person I've ever read who seems to prefer XML to JSON. Is there
anyone else out there who feels the same way? What's the perceived advantage
of XML over JSON? Can anyone shed some light on this?

~~~
metajack
I'm not going to defend Winer's point of view, but I also prefer XML for some
tasks. Namespaces make XML extensible in a way that JSON is not.

In XML, I can add an attribute or a child node anywhere without affecting
anything else. There is no easy way to extend JSON without jumping through
ugly hoops to recreate a more XML-like data model.

------
ErrantX
All Twitter apps? Certainly not mine because I, like most, actually read the
big notice that was on the api wiki for most of '09 saying basic auth would
disappear soon.

------
robryan
Since when have web platforms ever not been moving targets? It's a pretty
simple equation really, if people see enough value with being part of the
twitter platform they will update their code, if not, well twitter of decided
that it doesn't bother them to lose those people by making this change.

------
cubes
The twitpocalypse came and went, and developers updated there apps to use
64-bit ids for tweets. It was a necessary growing pain that the API had to go
through. This is no different.

------
kordless
Winer need to turn turn down the font scaling in his site. It's absolutely
HUGE on the iPad. If he doesn't fix it, I'm not going back. ;)

