

What Twitter's Announcement could have said - briandear
http://dashes.com/anil/2012/08/what-twitters-api-announcement-could-have-said.html

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kennywinker
Except 100,000 is not _a lot_ of user tokens. In fact in the iOS world (where
apps often cost $0.99) you could easily be failing if you only have 100,000
users.

And you don't mention the 200% cap on new users. That's not "many third-party
Twitter clients have dedicated user communities and passionate developers, and
with focus on keeping in step with our evolution, they should continue to
thrive with their audiences." That's more like "third-party clients should
stop developing, like now. There is no future for you with twitter".

~~~
robin_reala
My client of choice (Echofon) has a Twitter account with 1.7mil followers.
We’re talking an order of magnitude bigger.

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fields
A doubling is not an order of magnitude increase, no matter how big the
numbers are.

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46Bit
I believe (s)he was referring to an order of magnitude larger than the future
100k limit for new apps.

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jazzychad
Sorry, maybe it's my getting older and more cynical, but the overly excited
and positive tone of this rewrite makes it even easier to see through the spin
he is trying to put on it. It still sounds exactly as bad as the original.

~~~
natrius
The start was a bit saccharine, but this post is laden with _intent_.
Twitter's post lays down the law because they can. Anil's explains that the
changes are so they can balance the needs of third party developers with
Twitter's need to turn a profit. If you're announcing a potentially unpopular
decision, you're going to be better off if you lay your cards on the table so
people can tell that you're reasonable instead of a power-hungry jerk.

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alphang
Marco's analysis doesn't make it sound all that reasonable:
<http://www.marco.org/2012/08/16/twitter-api-changes>

I'm concerned about the rules about embedding a tweet. So now there'll be all
this widget stuff on websites when all I'm trying to read is a quoted tweet? I
guess this move is to let Twitter track my behavior across the web
(<http://dcurt.is/twitter-is-tracking-you-on-the-web>), but I worry about its
impact on other sites that use the API.

~~~
notatoad
Marco's analysis makes it sound less reasonable because Marco's analysis is
_wrong_ , and your interpretation of Marco's analysis makes even wronger
assumptions based off of his wrong assumptions.

They're not forcing you to use widgets, and you don't have to display tweets
as proscribed by their API restrictions if you aren't doing it through a
widget.

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jmoiron
From the twitter announcement (<https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-
to-twitter-api>):

"To ensure that Twitter users have a consistent experience wherever they see
and interact with Tweets, in v1.1 of the Twitter API we will shift from
providing Display Guidelines to Display Requirements, which we will also
introduce for mobile applications. We will require all applications that
display Tweets to adhere to these."

If Marco's reading is wrong, it's still the most obvious reading of the
original text.

Also:

"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."

Apropos to the Anil Dash version of the piece, the original one is already
heavily tarted up with euphemisms like "guidance" where "warning" would more
clearly convey their intentions.

I understand the type of petty social engineering that Anil has attempted
here, by spreading "Awesome" and "Excitement" around and accentuating the good
instead of the bad, but I think it does developers a great disservice to
assume that the biggest problem with bad news was the tone of its delivery and
not the news itself.

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Steko
Polishing a turd decreases the value of both the polish and the turd.

~~~
imrehg
<offtopic> Except when the Mythbusters are doing it, it's just pure awesome :)
[http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-
shows/mythbusters/videos/polishi...](http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-
shows/mythbusters/videos/polishing-a-turd-minimyth.htm) </offtopic>

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shyn3
I think the layout part isn't going to effect the developers as much as their
users, and their users are probably not going to twitter.com as it is.

Most people I know who hate the twitter layout use 3rd party clients to get
around that, now if those 3rd party clients have the same ugly layout what
does it matter? Ontop of that 100k users means those 3rd party clients will
disappear.. and hopefully the end user will be annoyed.

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voltagex_
Amazing what a change in tone will do for a product/API/launch announcement.

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youngtaff
Yeh, but as someone in the comments notes look at the bits he actually left
out - most of the restrictions for example

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beingpractical
Twitter should have been little more considerate in its communication with its
developer community. Anil Dash made all that sound comforting/positive. A must
leason for all platform enablers.

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rco8786
Hired!

