
Dear Twitter - ssclafani
http://helloform.com/blog/2011/03/dear-twitter/
======
shazow
I was reading through the Twitter dev mailing list, and found this poignant
observation from a poster:

    
    
        The most telling change in the Terms of Service occurred in sentence 
        #2 or paragraph #1 under section Rules of the Road. 
    
        It used to read: "We want to empower our ecosystem partners to build 
        valuable BUSINESSES around the information flowing through Twitter." 
    
        It now (since March 11, 2011) reads: "We want to empower our ecosystem 
        partners to build valuable TOOLS around the information flowing 
        through Twitter." 
    

\- [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/twitter-development-
talk/yCz...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/twitter-development-
talk/yCzVnHqHIWo/RrUkLf2a-RcJ)

~~~
runjake
It's not so much poignant (or any such emotional response) as it is
interesting. And it doesn't really strike me as interesting either. It just
seems like a rewording to be more inclusive.

To me, "businesses" imply "people that make money", "tools" implies "people
that make money, produce public services, etc".

~~~
Qz
'Businesses' make money for the business owners, 'tools' make money for
Twitter.

------
cletus
How anyone can be surprised by this is beyond me.

If your business is built _entirely_ on someone else's ecosystem there are two
possible outcomes:

1\. You fail or have meager success;

2\. You're very successful at which point the ecosystem provider will probably
judge what you do important enough to acquire you (or one of your
competitors!) or compete with you and have the home advantage.

The fact that some convinced themselves that Twitter was "different" might
want to refer to the Peanuts theme of Lucy and the football.

~~~
pbiggar
> If your business is built entirely on someone else's ecosystem there are two
> possible outcomes:

> 1\. You fail or have meager success;

I don't know why people keep repeating this fallacy. There is no shortage of
counter-examples, the most obvious being Zynga (hell, the homepage has a story
about Angry Birds' massive success _right now_, which is another example).

~~~
cletus
> There is no shortage of counter-examples, the most obvious being Zynga

And if you don't think Zynga is at risk from a change of policy by Facebook
you're kidding yourself.

It's a gamble. A _huge_ gamble. Zynga may in fact be large enough now to
survive war with Facebook but they'd be savaged and greatly diminished by it
(IMHO).

Look no further than the move to Facebook Credits [1] to see who really wields
the power in this relationship. Facebook has exacted a 30% cut, forced on app
developers (interestingly I haven't seen quite the same outrage at this as I
have about iOS subscription changes).

[1]: <http://www.allfacebook.com/zynga-facebook-credit-2010-09>

~~~
pbiggar
Of course there's a risk, but that doesn't mean its a bad idea.

I would say a great deal of the companies in the world are somehow at the
mercy of the fates, in a way similar to Zynga. A bus stop moves, and your
convenience store no longer gets traffic for example. Lockheed Martin has one
major customer - what would happen if the DoD arbitrarily changed the rules
for them? Every tech company relies on Google and Twitter for marketing and
traffic, what if they got caught it some algorithmic change and stopped
getting search traffic?

And so what - there's risk everywhere, but there's opportunity too. At the
risk of getting screwed, Zynga carved a $200m a year business. And now what?
They get 30% less? A nice problem to have.

~~~
dtby
_And now what? They get 30% less? A nice problem to have._

No, it's not. Ever.

~~~
pbiggar
I think you misunderstand the meaning of "A nice problem to have". It's like
when you have so many users that things start to fall over. Basically that
millions of people want to have the same problem you have.

------
Kilimanjaro
So twitter used developers to boost adoption (covering a UX deficiency) and
market penetration, then when they got universally known (and powerful enough
to build their own stuff now) they kicked devs in the ass?

Classy move, twitter.

~~~
shazow
More like when third-party apps get good enough, Twitter acquires one and
boots the rest.

~~~
guilleiguaran
Ironic, the only official client developed by Twitter is the web, all the
other clients were bought or contracted out.

~~~
slig
Not surprisingly, the web version sucks.

~~~
jpeterson
How so? I've found it to be a very nice experience.

Additionally, it troubles me greatly that this uninformative and borderline
trollish comment has so many upvotes.

~~~
ThomPete
Maybe it's just me but I find the browser experience to be completely non
real-time centric.

So perhaps you have different standards than me, but I fail to see how it's
better than something like TweetDeck.

------
codelust
The past year and half, Twitter has given me the distinct impression of being
the dog that chased a car and actually got the car, now it does not know what
to do with the car.

For a more reasonable analogy, Twitter is the equivalent of a telco. They are
the plumbing and the dumb pipe of the 140 character web at the moment. That
alone does not guarantee enough returns to justify the billion-plus dollar
valuation. Sadly, they don't have any other choice than to stifle the same
community that built the tooling which led them to be the success story they
are today.

~~~
br1
The telco analogy is gold. Hopefully twitter and telcos have the same dead
future in store.

~~~
codelust
Thanks :)

I am a convert - from an eternal pessimist to a nouveau-optimist. But, even
that does not spare me from being very pessimistic about the eventual fate of
Twitter.

The company, apparently ([http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-
announce/browse_t...](http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-
announce/browse_thread/thread/c82cd59c7a87216a?hl=en_US)), grew 3x in terms of
volume of messaging in the past 12-months, but it is very unlikely that their
revenue has grown 3x.

If that assumption is right, they are on a limited timeframe where their burn
rate will eclipse their average possible spends (funds brought in via
investments + revenue).

In effect, they have a very short time frame to get this story right -
irrespective of whether they piss off the developer ecosystem or not.

I don't like "dead future" stories, but I don't think this is going to wind up
with a different fate.

------
stevefarnworth
For me, it's not only the fact they're just dismissing the community which got
them to where they are today, but that the statement just felt _wrong_.

It's contradictory - they want UI/UX consistency, but are encouraging non-
core-client diversity, and they're complaining about user confusion when
they're bragging about holding 90% client share. Plus the timing could have
been better. Releasing the statement yesterday when there was nothing time
sensitive to it probably wasn't the best approach for them (seen to be burying
bad news).

Building your entire business on someone else's ecosystem is always a risky
strategy, but when a company who has reached critical mass pretty much
_solely_ because of that ecosystem, to turn around and tell them they're no
longer required is poor form.

------
wallflower
Twitter is really concerned about monetizing the 10% that don't use the
official Twitter clients? That seems very corporate. I was happy when Twitter
broke into the mainstream (Tweets from celebrities and/or Tweets quoted/shown
on major news networks), and this latest development seems to show that they
effectively want a scrolling CNN News type ticker (eventually) in their UI of
promoted "trends" (how can it be a trend if it is promoted)?

Are they going to block anonymous API usage as well? I would be really annoyed
as I don't like morassing through OAuth to get a Tweet.

e.g.

[http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?user_id...](http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?user_id=428333&amp;count=1)

(428333=Cnn Breaking News)

~~~
Turing_Machine
I would speculate what they're really doing is making sure that 10% doesn't
jump to, say, 90% after they start jamming their own client full of ads.

------
jws
And just because it needs saying somewhere, and is also symptomatic of
corporate ego problems:

Dear Twitter, if I follow a link to your one of your feeds, then hit the back
button, I expect to be back where I started, not at some portal function for
further twittiness.

------
btipling
Is there some mechanism where by a startup, or any company for that matter,
might provide some guarantee with their API that they will not change it? Some
kind of legal contract that isn't so onerous that it must involve expensive
lawyers for every single developer sign up? What amount of time for API
support would be satisfactory?

Seems to me that Twitter sort of did this via a simple terms of use and that
now they are making changes for new developers not existing ones. APIs are
never going to last forever. I agree Twitter's new stance is bad for
developers and users but the way they went about it seems reasonable to me.
The why doesn't seem reasonable but it doesn't really matter. This isn't the
great API apocalypse of 2011 though. I do not feel less discouraged to make
use of APIs today than I did yesterday.

~~~
extension
_Some kind of legal contract..._

Well, yes, it's called.. a contract. An API provider could put their
obligations in writing, though they would probably have to charge at least a
small fee to make the contract stand.

But providers are not going to do that unless developers make it worth their
while, and vice-versa. The economics of open APIs just don't support that kind
of commitment on either end.

If you want to build a business around someone's free API, you better have a
quick exit planned.

------
snissn
Their move motivates the discussion of the merits of the premise that
developers really are a commodity, and what is important and fundamental is
the ecosystem. Developing facebook apps is a nightmare of constantly having to
hit a moving target, and constantly updating and maintaining old code. I've
left and abandoned that area, but companies like zynga clearly have stayed and
have even begun breaking out of that ecosystem. This is not just an online or
social media phenomenon but also extends to brick and mortar stores, malls,
mail order catalogs, etc.

I feel like there are three groups of people, the people that have always
realized that it's twitter's prerogative to act in it's own economic best
interest and never trusted the idea of building a business on that, the second
group that knows that to be true, but thought 'oh twitter is an exception' and
the third that simply heard twitter's initial press releases that 'we don't
care about monetization' and we're different.

Premise: Everyone's going to target the ecosystem that has people on it,
before it was search and look at all of the SEO spam, currently it's twitter
and facebook, and the goal is to engage users via that customer acquisition
platform, and eventually build your own community and continue the cycle.

------
petercooper
_In those days, and I hope my memory isn’t failing me, the number of tweets
from third party clients was dramatically higher than those “from the web”._

That hasn't been my experience (in seeing what people I follow use since Dec
2006) and I've seen a few surveys over the years which, to my memory, showed
the Web client as being the most popular (even taking the majority, usually).
One I just dug up:
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_twitter_clients_def...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_twitter_clients_definitive_list.php)

It's not exactly the point, though, and it doesn't make Twitter's new stance
any less ridiculous, but the Web client is certainly popular. I'm biased
though, been using it since 2006 and 25,000 tweets..

------
stevederico
The implicit nature of an open client ecosystem fuels innovation. Has twitter,
decided they will control innovation on the platform going forward? An Apple
HIG-like policy should be seriously considered before this drastic cutoff.

