

Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes - benatkin
http://www.marco.org/2012/08/16/twitter-api-changes

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politician
From Apple to Facebook to Twitter, are we learning that APIs and App Stores
are simply traps wherein complements are commoditized so as to drive adoption
and to explore (or ripoff) enhancements?

These things seem to be win/win/win for the providers and angst/angst/angst
for wannabe collaborators.

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look_lookatme
I think we are learning, given App.net isn't a closed, centralized system and
can't dictate usage terms for users and developers at will.

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jmspring
App.net is not centralized? Pretty sure it is. That said, Dalton has stated he
intends to be more open than twitter/FB.

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brianshaler
Well then. If Dalton stated it, I'm sure it'll stay that way forever and he'll
never change his mind. Let's give him money!

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dasil003
There's a _huge_ difference between founding a company on a vision of being a
utility for developers and attempting to fulfill all the promise that Twitter
had in the early days, versus the actual Twitter where they never really
figured out what they were doing and scaled out to require such levels of
investment that the grown ups inevitably moved in and started cannibalizing it
for cash.

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andy_herbert
The rules on displaying a tweet on a website seem so batshit insane I can only
assume that my interpretation of it is wrong, and it should only apply to
applications that provide the functionality of a Twitter client.

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MatthewPhillips
They sound unenforceable to me. I'm pretty sure fair use dictates I can quote
a person from Twitter without regard to their lame guidelines.

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jdminhbg
You don't have to follow Twitter's guidelines for displaying a tweet (you're
right about fair use, I think); but Twitter doesn't have to authorize your
OAuth keys to give you API access either.

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rhizome
You don't need OAuth to pull a (or several) tweet(s).

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imaginator
Wow. This all seems very micro-manager-y.

Now I'm curious how Twitter will respond: some open souce developers are
working on integrating Twitter posts to buddycloud. That means Tweets will be
displayed in a buddycloud channel. How exactly does twitter expect someone
running a twitter-buddycloud gateway on their domain. Additionally buddycloud
channels (containing tweets) can be displayed in a text client ala
<https://github.com/Schnouki/bccc#screenshot> Are we expected to <blockquote>
our VTs? :)

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rhizome
If the hue and cry raises to a high enough level, they might back off _a
little_. "Ask for twice what you want," etc.

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kylemaxwell
If Twitter thinks I won't use <blockquote> to show a tweet when I want to,
they're smoking something. That has to mean something else, right?

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alecperkins
My interpretation is that it's referring to actually embedding a tweet in a
way that pulls it live via the API (or otherwise presented as a tweet entity),
and that just quoting someone's tweet (like one would quote an article) is
still fine (how could it not be?). I could be wrong.

These kinds of specific restrictions that aren't actually specific enough and
really up to their whim are troubling. Twitter needs to be careful that their
regulations don't become too much of a burden on their ecosystem. The
vagueness and uncertainty of their rules is the problem.

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kylemaxwell
Yeah, on second reading, I was totally wrong. I went and looked at the actual
document (what a concept, heh) and they are specifically talking about using
applications to display or embed tweets.

I still don't think that's a great idea, but it concerns me a lot less.

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alecperkins
That there's any confusion is why this is a problem. Once you start getting
into centralized, micromanegerial control of the content of applications, you
have to handle all the details, all the edge cases. Law has the same problem.

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lukifer
Question: is there anything stopping an app from using an invisible embedded
web view to pull content from Twitter, mimicking a plain browser, and then
scraping the content from the DOM as a poor man's API?

It would be tedious as hell, especially now that Twitter is all-Ajax-all-the-
time, and it would be a moving target as they made changes, but could Twitter
really do anything to stop it?

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poblano
I was going to ask that exact question.

I think the answer is no, they can't stop you. And perhaps I'm being naïve,
but it doesn't seem like it would be too terribly tedious if you used a
scraping library, at least not for replacing basic API functions (i.e. getting
a user's recent tweets).

Obviously this would be limited to public tweets (no private tweets, no
tweeting on the user's behalf, and no DMs).

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natrius
_"Obviously this would be limited to public tweets (no private tweets, no
tweeting on the user's behalf, and no DMs)."_

I don't think any of those limitations apply. If you can do something via a
web browser, you can do it programmatically, depending on how much pain you're
willing to endure.

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poblano
Sorry, right -- I was just thinking of straight-up scraping of public pages.
Asking for the user's password and logging in to do more scraping would
probably be possible, but a lot more painful.

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zdw
So, what does this mean for CLI clients?

I hardly ever use them, but things like Bitlbee or the ruby twitter gem are
handy once in a while...

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gcr
I agree. Bitlbee is eons better than Twitter's official client in terms of
accessibility for the visual impaired.

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cicloid
This may be seen in the future as the big momement and somehow like a big
favour for App.net current hype.

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dinkumthinkum
The problem is the teeming masses that are the ones creating all those
nonsensical tweets that make Twitter so popular couldn't care less about these
problems ...

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ricardobeat
Apparently the new rules completely obliterate the just-launched branch.com.
That's incredibly stupid.

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notatoad
What's incredibly stupid is starting a business that depends so heavily on a
free third party API that it can be brought down by a rule change.

Nobody is entitled to twitter's data except twitter.

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Silhouette
I just had a quick look at Twitter's terms, and it seems pretty clear that
tweets are not Twitter's data. The copyright remains with the poster, and
Twitter has a non-exclusive licence.

So while I agree with your basic point that starting a business so completely
dependent on something that could disappear overnight is probably unwise, it
seems it's really only the API that is Twitter's, not the content itself. That
could be a significant distinction, depending on how this all plays out.

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notatoad
that seems like a fairly meaningless semantic point. twitter controls the
access to the data, therefore it is their data. all the copyright means is
that tweet authors are free to take the content of their tweets and put it
somewhere else.

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Silhouette
_twitter controls the access to the data_

Twitter controls access to the data via API.

Whether they can do anything about someone scraping their site manually is a
different question.

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akkartik
I find myself wondering: why the heck do I even have a twitter account? I
hardly ever use it anyway. A political gesture is as good a reason as any to
simplify my life.

Turns out I need it for authenticating a couple of external sites. But its
days are numbered..

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joewee
I can't understand how this affects companies like twitmusic.com which just
closed a round from 500 startups. Or perhaps disqus.com which has a lot of
integrations with twitter in their app.

Can someone shed some light on this?

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Kerrick
What does rule 5a, "Tweets that are grouped together into a timeline should
not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other
networks," mean for Gwibber and other desktop social clients?

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MatthewPhillips
It means they're going to have to remove Twitter.

Twitter doesn't want to be abstracted away as just another stream of messages.

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protomyth
Does this kill Instagram on twitter?

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ojbyrne
Great timing for app.net.

