

Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow? - jdp23
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/06/did-twitter-just-deliver-third-party-apps-a-death-blow.php

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simonsarris
Maybe there's a trend here, but maybe its just me being short-sighted. I'll
type out what I'm thinking.

I think that the uncomfortable future for a lot of the e-properties that
people enjoy happens to hinge on the fact that the way they are the most
useful clashes with the ways they can make money. Big time.

Facebook will sponsor stories, alienating users a little for eyeball time.

Twitter will make sure promoted things get their eyeball time by crushing 3rd
party (alienating users).

Digg will- well. You know.

All of these moves hurt the utility of those companies. All of the companies
know that.

But something happened with Digg, didn't it? The models of the above have to
very carefully balance utility/pleasure of use with a certain amount of
intrusiveness to make money because they have found few other good ways,
though some get credit for experimenting.

And every time a major e-property does this they make a chink in their dam,
inviting their sweet sweet reservoir of users to look beyond into a river of
startups. Maybe there are more useful options out there for little fish.
Cleaner spaces, open air. Let's be honest I'm bad at metaphors. Moving on.

Myspace became ridiculous and thousands (millions) fled to Facebook.

Digg became ridiculous and many fled to Reddit.

Twitter and Facebook are trying to monetize more and will become more
ridiculous and less useful in the process. They might survive, but they are
inviting others to take their place in the meantime.

And someday those new companies will build dams around users and either try to
get them to gawk at more ads and maybe fall in the same way. This model seems
to work for a little while, but they still need to solve the large clash of
interest brought about by advertising. Search engines still do it best: ads
displayed that try to match queries with relevant content aren't necessarily
offensive to taste.

Almost everything else is still trading user abuse for irrelevant product. All
users wanna do is talk about the kind of sandwich they ate. Nobody wants to
"Learn how YOU can help Hyundai make August National Fuel-Efficiency month!"
(real ad).

~~~
sedev
The takeaway lesson for me is that _user-generated content is incompatible
with advertising._

Now, as a caveat, I'm the sort of person who thinks that modern advertising is
99% toxic sludge in the mental environment: I am firmly in the Kalle Lasn
camp. However, here's how I see it working: users come to the site because of
the UGC, but advertising, by nature, has to grab attention at some level. You
can't design for both "make the UGC, stuff users actually care about, primary"
and "make sure that you get ad clickthroughs." Since the latter pays the
bills, it tends to win - and users tend to leave because on one level or
another, it's obvious that the site isn't about them (and if your site depends
on UGC, your users ain't wrong to think that the site should be about them!)

The secondary takeaway is that _advertising is not a long-term sustainable
business model._

Advertising has a strong tendency to push startups into this insular turtles-
all-the-way-down bullshit: social media with ads for analytics, analytics for
ad-based startups, startups about how to reach demographics, and so on.
They're as familiar an archetype around here as Punch & Judy. But it's all the
tertiary economy, it's all flash: the fundamentals of advertising as a
business model only get weaker over time. The effectiveness of advertising _at
all, in any context_ is debateable, and participating it is participating in
an endless arms race. I argue that this should tell us that advertising is not
the way to go if you want to build a lasting company: you need to take money
in exchange for goods and services (real goods and services: advertising
doesn't count, as I'm in the process of arguing).

That's hard! That's really difficult. PayPal, Square, and WePay should show us
how ridiculously, gratuitously difficult the "take money for" part is, and
taking people's money once you've convinced them that you've got something
worth their money, is the _easy part!_ Before you even get there, you have to
build something good, and none of us should have any illusions that that's
easy. Then between those two parts, there's "persuade users that your cool
thing actually is cool and worth paying money for," and sweet leaping Buddhas
that's a lifetime of work in itself (the lifetime of work, in fact, that
advertising is doing in such a toxic and commons-destroying way right now).

But: you are a _hacker._ You are a _hustler._ You are an _engineer._

 __ _Solving hard problems is your job._ __

Advertising is not a business model: advertising is a problem to be solved.
Advertising is a bullshit legacy of past business models, here to be
disrupted. The reason that I hang out on Hacker News is that I believe that
its hackers, hustlers, and engineers are the people who can look at the way we
do something now, think "that suck! I can do better than that!" and then do
the difficult, frustrating, painful work to actually make something better,
show people why it's better, and accept the monetary rewards that come from
having made something better and proved it.

We can do this.

~~~
notatoad
Your arguments about why UGC is incompatible with advertising seem like they
could apply equally to all content.

i think a better argument is that _unstructured_ UGC is incompatible with
advertising. Pinterest, for example, seems to be doing all right, because
their site is basically a repository of things people want to buy.
StackOverflow doesn't seem to be having any issues using ads to monetize,
because their niche makes their ad-space valuable to advertisers and relevant
to users. Where facebook and twitter fail is that they have tons of data about
users, but not about what users want _at that particular instant_. An ad for
windows server hosting on ServerFault is not competing with the content, it's
complementing the content. it's a natural progression that doesn't require me
to refocus to be effective. Facebook knows what i like, but not what i'm
thinking about. When i'm looking at pictures of friends, any advertisement
requires me to refocus onto a different topic.

------
zemaj
Short answer - no.

There's a lot of people over-reacting to this situation. If you read Twitter's
blog post its clear that they're following up on enforcing the API "Rules of
the Road" they've had for over a year.
[https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-
twitter-e...](https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-twitter-
experience)

Section !.5. clearly lays out the rules clients must follow "Your Service may
be an application or client that provides major components of a Twitter-like
end user experience (a "Client"). An example of a Client is a downloadable
application that displays user timelines and allows users to create and search
for tweets. If so, certain additional terms apply, including:"

These rules are actually pretty generous and plainly lay out their
expectations for third party applications. It's unclear what led to Tweets
being removed from LinkedIn, my guess would be that Twitter attempted to
enforce their branding rules, LinkedIn declined and instead said they would
remove the Tweets from being displayed entirely. It doesn't sound like Twitter
just cut off access to LinkedIn or came up with new restrictions they haven't
already been publishing (and compelling 3rd parties to comply with) for a long
time.

Any business must deal with existential threats, be it from competitors,
regulation or bad investments. Building a business on top of an API is just
another potential risk, you need to decide if they company in question is a
safe enough bet to play on, just like you have to decide the same thing for
all other risks.

~~~
ebiester
Wait.. What other uses are there for a Twitter API? What I don't understand is
why Twitter can't just insert their ads I to these API requests and be done
with it.

~~~
Tichy
There are I think over 100000 Twitter apps (don't remember the exact number,
but it was a lot). I think those are not all Twitter clients.

------
suprgeek
I think this is a Great wake-up call to everyone who builds on someone else's
platform. You are not the master of the house - and can be kicked out at any
time.

One way to circumvent this is to have binding legal stuff in place, another is
bring so much unique value to the platform that the owners are scared of mass
defections should they break your app.

With Twitter I do not see any Third-party app in this category. Only companies
of the likes of Apple & Google have the necessary influence to cause Twitter
to think twice before making incompatible changes. Others are toast.

------
biggfoot
The little voice in my head just got a whole lot louder - "don't friggin build
a business on someone else's business. Do your own shit!"

~~~
SoftwareMaven
It is ok to build on somebody else's business IFF you have a contract in place
protecting you. The problem is, today, there are few contracts signed because
that would prevent tomorrow's pivot (that screws all of today's partners).

~~~
biggfoot
"Tomorrow's pivot" :) I think you summed up all of it with that phrase.

------
DaNmarner
"Twitter’s applications programming interface (API), the source code that
allows the developers to have access to user account information and Tweets."

"Until Favstar came along in 2009, the Twitter star was a little-used and
largely ignored feature."

Am I the only one that feels the author has some research to do?

------
bbrian
I can still see tweets in the iPad LinkedIn app, though possibly from before
when the article was published. It would be a dream come true if people
stopped being able to import Twitter into their LinkedIn. It's polluting.

~~~
gergles
Yes, the limitation is that new tweets cannot be pulled in, but existing
tweets are not going to be deleted.

I agree that seeing twitter feeds on the LinkedIn feed polluted it with
garbage, and am glad on a personal level to see them going away.

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ricardobeat
While they keep killing off third party apps, usage is going down in every
circle I'm in, and I see myself using FB and Path more and more. I think
they're making their own death bed.

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i386
Honestly, there are a whole lot more interesting problems to solve outside of
Twitters ecosystem. Storm, meet teacup.

------
zafriedman
Always

