
Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead - joshus
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/08/16/twitter-drop-dead
======
cletus
This doesn't surprise me at all. When you develop on someone else's platform,
you have to walk a fine line between not being successful at all and being too
successful such that the platform provider co-opts your business (maybe you
get lucky and get bought out). This is nothing new. Such moves as this were
(IMHO) inevitable. They'll slowly chip away at anything they see as taking
revenue from them.

The part I disagree with is that this will doom Twitter. It will not. They've
already achieved a certain level of success. Most people use and will continue
to use the Website or the official client and be happy with that.

I do believe that Twitter is doomed to be acquired however. Apple seems the
likely frontrunner for this but I think Twitter needs Apple more than Apple
needs Twitter at this point.

Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to
commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at
best. There is _nothing_ preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.

There are many reasons I'm glad about Facebook's floundering market debut.
This is one of them: it's taking the wind out of the sails of the social hype
(IMHO).

~~~
dm8
Everyone cites Myspace. Either Twitter or Facebook does something
controversial and we hear everyone citing Myspace. Myspace didn't lose it's
user base due to amazing UX for end-user. They lost their user base due to
combination of bad UX and "mobile" user base. Majority of Myspace users were
teenagers and by the time they went to college they had hot new social network
in form of Facebook, which was exclusively for them. And Myspace was never big
in non-English speaking markets.

Twitter on the other hand offers good UX. They have loyal user base of
millions of users from different age groups. They are huge in Asian markets.
And they have celebrity users, governments, political leaders, olympians etc.
It will be very hard to move entire user base from Twitter to some other
service.

App.net is an interesting alternative. And they can disrupt real-time
information market. I think App.net can have number of use cases like firehose
of realtime feeds for devs . But killing Twitter entirely will be very hard!

EDIT 1: Grammar

EDIT 2: Twitter for me is more than infrastructure utility. It's my primary
information network.

~~~
shardling
>Twitter on the other hand offers good UX

Every time I go to twitter in a browser I want to punch whoever designed it in
the face. It is by far and away the most annoying site I encounter on a daily
basis, which is impressive given that all I want it to do is _display
plaintext_.

~~~
raverbashing
So much this

I figure out they have 2 designers there, one really good and one that doesn't
have the slightest idea of UX and design

Case in point: the way DMs are notified to the user. That's right, in the
previous web version _it wasn't_. And this version is better, but not great

~~~
ido
Doesn't it send you an email if you get DMs?

~~~
danudey
I've turned that off, because I tend to get notifications in my clients.
There's no good Windows client yet though, so when I'm on my gaming machine
and don't have my phone handy, I use the web client for tweeting, and I never
notice DMs.

~~~
RandallBrown
I like Echofon a lot. Their Windows client is essentially just their firefox
plugin running as it's own app, but it's pretty good.

I especially like that I can sync all the tweets I've read between my Windows
machine at work, my iPhone, and my Mac at home. I don't know of any other app
that works for those 3 platforms and has syncing.

~~~
danudey
I'll give that a try, but I don't care much for Echofon on any other
platforms.

There is a service called Tweetmarker (<http://tweetmarker.net>) which some
clients are now using to flag your last-read location amongst other clients on
other platforms (e.g. Osfoora on Mac and Tweetbot on iOS).

------
thought_alarm
Of all the social media and web services that have cropped up in the last 5
years, Twitter was the one that really filled me with joy. It's so simple!
It's just plain text in bite sized pieces at a time. And it's universal! It
works just as well on state of the art hardware as it does on a crappy SMS
dumbphone or green-screen serial terminal. And it's as compelling in Egypt or
Pakistan as it is in New York or London.

Whenever I get fed up with the complextiy of Facebook or Google+ I'll load up
Twitter on an old Apple II, via TTYtter and a serial connection; I'll watch
the green text scroll along at 1200 baud and think about how this one simple,
geeky text service, pure as a 1980s BBS, somehow made it, worldwide, in 2012.

And now they're hellbent on ruining all of that. Fuck Twitter.

~~~
AVTizzle
Would love to see a screenshot (or picture?) of that!

~~~
keithpeter
A short video clip would probably go viral on YouTube

~~~
crb
Here you go: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j622EyPX6lM>

~~~
keithpeter
Love the graphics! Excellent.

------
joering2
Sometimes I tend to see the dark side of human in everything they do. Sorry,
its just the way I am.

I say when twitter was still this little chick, their approach was "we love
all users, we welcome engineers; build amazing tools and surprise us!". I
think the reason for that was to speed up the process of spreading the word -
a simple fact that geek working on twitter 3rd party is still a human with
plenty of friends to spread the word about twitter - so he can be helpful: let
him spend his time doing what he likes doing the best - programming and he
will become our cheap (free) PR tube.

But now I bet most of a new age civilization knows or uses twitter. So it is
time for a reality check: "fuck off of our platform; we don't need you
anymore! You got all your friends to know twitter, some even addict to it; now
stay away from trying to run your pathetic queries, using our own data
stream".

Just my version/2c.

edit: my understanding is that Dorsey still has the most to say in the twitter
world. With all its nastiness going on between twitter curtain, I say stay the
hell far away from any startup he will do in the future. Sorry, but if he
signs up half of the world on his square, what on Earth is stopping him from
switching 2.5% to 10% fee?? nothing!! At least the past (present) shows he has
the balls to execute moves that average tweeting Joe is not a fan of: shutting
down 3rd parties, kicking out linkedin, shutting down instagram access, etc.
Bottom line: stay away!

~~~
pedalpete
Square doesn't have a network effect, it doesn't really matter if one store
uses square, and the neighboring store uses google wallet, dwolla, or
something else.

~~~
natrius
Square and payment systems in general most certainly do have network effects.
For instance, I don't have a Discover card because it's not worth the hassle
of checking whether each merchant accepts it.

Network effects are the lion's share of the justification behind Square's
Starbucks deal.

------
mirkules
If Twitter's business is threatened by third-party apps, why not charge for an
API license? I also can't quite understand why developers expect a free API
from services like Twitter and then complain when something changes?

What is the business advantage of Twitter (or Facebook, or what-have-you)
releasing a free, public API to anyone who asks, and how did they plan to
monetize it when it got popular? You can't build your business model around
"here, use my service for free" and not have a plan how to convert either the
users of the 3rd party developers' software or the 3rd party developers
themselves into paying customers (or monetize on that somehow, i.e. mining
data, selling ads, etc). Maybe I'm just being naive -- I honestly don't have
much experience dealing with these sorts of things, so I would love it if
someone could break it down.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I agree with you. Google's model is pretty good with most of their 25+ APIs
having free tiers. Free is nice but being in a real business relationship
feels better to me because it is more likely to be sustainable. Microsoft's
API marketplace has the same solid sustainable feeling.

If a business idea requires free use of other people's services then think of
another idea.

------
stephenlovell
The large swath of discussion seems to be focusing on App Development, which
is probably the hardest hit.

However, there's another area that has gotten me wondering, non-app, non-
client based websites using the API, in reference to the Display
Guidelines..er Rules.

This is the bit specifically.

"Users must have a consistent experience wherever they interact with Tweets,
whether on Twitter.com, a mobile client, website, or in an application
developed with the Twitter API"

So lets say that I go to GitHub and grab a little jQuery plugin to pull in my
tweets on my personal portfolio. Does that also mean I have to make sure I
include my own avatar, my username, Tweet actions, and twitter branding, among
other things? What if those elements are unnecessary to the design or
intention of what I'm doing on the site?

And then there's the fact that all of these jQuery plugins are going to have
to start implementing authenticated access (if they weren't already, which
many seem to not be.) I don't have access to data on the matter, but I would
surmise that there's a significant number of personal and portfolio sites out
there pulling in tweets that are either not authenticated, or are modifying
the tweet display in some way. All the ones I've interacted with have settings
for turning avatar display on or off, or unlinking hash tags or links, etc.

Thoughts?

------
maxpow4h
From here, I think we should move to a distributed model, like email and xmpp.

It needs to be Open Source so anyone can run it and everyone owns their data.

It needs to be compatible with current Twitter apps so all it requires is
setting the API root.

It needs to be distributed so anyone can follow anyone anywhere. There is no
owner or root, there is no place to shut down.

Proof of concept: <https://nstatus.herokuapp.com>

Source: <https://github.com/maxpow4h/nekomimi>

I wrote about the requirements of it here: <http://maxpow4h.com/blog/twitter/>

edit: you can use any username with any password to sign in to nstatus. It
then uses that password for your username. You can even do this from the
official iOS Twitter app, just sign in.

~~~
lloydwatkin
Sounds like what you are after is buddycloud (<https://beta.buddycloud.org>),
lets list its win points:

\- open-source \- open-standards \- free \- federated

Keep your own data, talk with whoever you wish.

Built on XMPP and actively contributed to by a great group of developers
(admission: I am on of these developers).

When you join up you can find me at lloyd@evilprofessor.co.uk

~~~
smacktoward
This looks really interesting. Is there a page on the site somewhere that
gives a high-level overview of what it is and how it works? The wiki has lots
of technical details, but nothing I could find that you could email to a
decisionmaker and say "you should read this."

~~~
imaginator
/me nods. I'll write something up this weekend. Thanks for the feedback!

------
lancewiggs
I wouldn't have as much immediate issue with this if Twitter's own clients
were acceptable - they are not. And this is an asinine move either way.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Twitter's own clients are fine. You can read tweets and send tweets. That's
the basis of the service. It's supposed to be simple. Why don't you like it?

~~~
rcknight
The mac client has not been updated since June 2011 ... hardly well supported!

~~~
chris_wot
Not really a valid reason. What is it about the client that needs to be
updated?

~~~
smackfu
Amusingly, it doesn't even use Twitter's own picture service for photos
attachments which is a year old at this point. It still uses yfrog.

------
rjsamson
I don't see this ending well for them. Alienating the very developer base that
helped them grow as a platform early on is a huge mistake.

As an aside, I feel even better about backing App.net after seeing this news.

~~~
jsilence
But who is keeping app.net from doing the same thing once they killed Twitter
and reached a size where they can say: Thanks for all your friends, now get
off of our platform.

We need open protocols and a decentralized social network where we have
different implementations with focus on different use cases which are still
able to communicate with one another.

A good chunk of the protocols and implementations is already there with OAuth,
Activity streams, salmon, RSS and such. And there are already open sourced
implementations like status.net and others alike.

The solution is already there. We only need to start using it.

------
mmaunder
Unless platforms like Facbeook or Twitter make a significant amount of money
from their devs, the way Microsoft or Apple does, telling their devs to go
pound sand at some point is inevitable.

~~~
btipling
Facebook makes a lot of money from their devs.

~~~
yen223
Not nearly enough, by all accounts.

~~~
rhp
Zynga accounted for 15% of Facebook's revenue in Q1. Although Zynga's
contribution declined compared to last year, payments and fees revenue (mostly
from apps) doubled over last year to $186 million. That's not an insignificant
amount.

Source: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/zynga-made-up-15-of-
faceboo...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/zynga-made-up-15-of-facebooks-
revenue-in-q1-down-from-19-a-year-ago/)

------
ziadbc
Twitter wants to give you access to the data. Their client is their main
product. Thus, every 3rd party client is competing with their main product,
that seems to be a fact.

Theres no way to stop you from building one anyway, twitter knows that. If you
go against their rules, you're a revolutionary, and if you win that
revolution, they'll have to deal with you.

You can't expect however, that the incumbent is going to go around encouraging
revolutions against themselves.

The only alternative is to encourage everyone to make clients, at which point,
they're just a big cloud xmpp server to the world.

~~~
sillysaurus
Twitter had better take a long, hard look at Joel's old essay on Platforms:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html>

Declaring war on your third-party developers is shortsighted at best, fatal at
worst.

~~~
iandanforth
Perhaps there is a class of people who pay for email apps. I'm not one of
them. I don't see twitter as a platform, or at least don't use it as one. It
is a communication medium which, for all my usage, could have no developer
ecosystem.

Professionally I would love to have free access to the Firehose, that's some
juicy data. But as a consumer Twitter 'apps' are no more worth my money than
email apps.

------
uptown
I find it ironic that the company that's created Bootstrap - an entire toolkit
encouraging developers to adopt their site's visual style - is so opposed to
any other aspect of following their lead.

~~~
eric-hu
It seems to me that if Twitter were able to offer their API freely to devs at
zero cost to themselves, they would do so.

Twitter bootstrap, on the other hand, is something they built for themselves
to reduce the friction of creating rich, consistent UIs. Developing it is a
sunk cost. Offering it free to the world should cost them nothing as it's
hosted on Github [1].

Like others in this thread, I lament that Twitter has become less egalitarian.
Moving forward, developers with one idea of usage will have more Twitter clout
than developers with "lesser" ideas, but Twitter has bills to pay and
investors to answer to. It's far from an ideal world, but I can't offer them a
better solution for their problems.

[1] <https://github.com/plans/> all plans offer 'unlimited public repos'

------
ricardobeat
> To prevent malicious use of the Twitter API and gain an understanding bla
> bla bla...

Translation: so that we can charge even light API users.

This will surely backfire - some services will switch from API usage to
screen-scraping, resulting in an even higher load on twitter's servers.

~~~
virmundi
At that point Twitter will simply block IP address, or some such. Sure there
will be a game of catch me if you can, but the end is that no one really wins,
and Twitter may suffer because people will use it to bad mouth Twitter. Enough
user sentiment, even if it start from the devs of a few highly used apps, and
Twitter might want to reconsider.

~~~
bad_user
If the client is native, you can do that scrapping client side. Say your app
has 10000 users. Assuming they can detect this (not likely) what are they
gonna do? Block 10000 IPs?

------
sequoia
What client devs have actually stopped development and abandoned/shut down
their applications in response to Twitter's client TOS changes? I hear lots of
griping and moaning it seems like lots of the major client players are
developing nonetheless, which says to twitter "keep doing what you're doing."

------
throwa
Developers seem to flock to platforms like Apple, Facebook and Twitter based
on the fact that they have a large and growing user base without giving
thought to this issue of commoditization of complements and how the ultimately
destroy the business or livelihood of these developers.

Most people building products or sharecropping on other people's platform
never make meaningful income and yet those platform keep will prefer to
announce large sums paid out to developers to encourage you to keep building
complements. Apple will claim they paid out $5 billion but spread the numerous
app developers it becomes peanut and not enough to pay their bills. They won't
tell you that to pay out $5bn they made atleast $2billion based on their 30%
cut.

They don't tell you that iOS app success is a "lottery": 60% (or more) of
developers don't break even

[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-
lo...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lottery-
and-60-of-developers-dont-break-even/)

[http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-
fail...](http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-failing-like-
its-1999/)

I really hope people will think hard before building their business on the
back of Apple, Facebook, Twitter or any such platform. You can use them as as
distribution without being dependent on them and that is the way to go.

Be your own bitch and not a Twitter, Apple or Facebook bitch:

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-
bit...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bitch/)

------
dinkumthinkum
Twitter's developer problem is probably at about level 9 right now. My
question is what's really the big deal. Twitter can do what they want and
really more to the point, I don't think Twitter should be the primary focus of
innovation from our community. It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char
messages. I get it it, it's amazing ... but come on, we can get past Twitter.

~~~
andrewfelix
_> It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages._

This maybe true for a lot of tweets. But my stream is filled with live updates
of interesting stuff from around the world.

Twitter has been instrumental in getting news out of war zones for example.

~~~
colmvp
Yeah I don't know why Twitter gets so much hate. It is similar to Reddit: What
you get is what you subscribe to.

------
ianstormtaylor
Wonder how they got the bright idea to advocate limiting the quadrant named
"Consumer Engagement".

Surprised they didn't try to make it a bit less obvious.

~~~
voyou
The blog post is actually annoyingly ambiguous - do they want to limit _all_
the stuff in the "consumer engagement" quadrant, or just the "traditional
clients," while encouraging other sorts of "consumer engagement" (they
mention, and don't make clear if they're in favor of or against, Favstar and
Storify).

------
countessa
can't say I blame them really. They have a product, they have the
infrastructure to support it....why shouldn't they have right of first refusal
on how to monetize the thing?

Seems to me that developers are getting all pissy because they can't have free
reign to a platform that isn't even theirs. Perhaps, at the end of the day,
Twitter doesn't care - they don't need the developers as early adopters
anymore and it must be a fair old strain to keep the api infrastructure
supporting them when the resources could be more profitably used building
something else inside the company.

------
andrewfelix
Utter hypocrisy that they're discouraging third party clients, after having
acquired one.

app.net suddenly looks more attractive.

~~~
streptomycin
app.net looks more attractive, until the same shit starts happening there in 5
years. The problem is walled garden social networks. It's a fundamentally bad
idea for everyone involved, except the people who own it and can turn a
profit. StatusNet/Identica is a much better solution to this problem than yet
another walled garden. Free, open source, and federated. How many times does
the same shit need to happen before people realize the only long-term
solution?

~~~
MBCook
The possible difference there is that app.net has both a business plan (sell
access to post to the service) as well as a feedback model if they do
something stupid (people will stop paying them).

~~~
streptomycin
Sure, that's a difference, but a rather incremental difference IMHO. Not
nearly as big a difference as federation and open source, which is what we
really need to break out of the walled gardens.

~~~
Firehed
How many successful open-source platforms are there? I can't think of any.
Unlike Free software, platforms have a maintenance cost (servers), and that
cost cannot be paid by donated man-hours.

The only thing close that I can think of is BitTorrent due to the distrubuted
infrastructure, but that's quite impractical to duplicate in this context (how
can browsing the content contribute back to hosting and storage
automatically?)

In an ideal world I agree, but that's not where we live.

~~~
streptomycin
There are many. Email is a particularly notable example. Luckily, the
technology sector wasn't run by "entrepreneurs" back when email was invented,
or we would have wound up with walled gardens there too (Hotmail users can
only email other Hotmail users and contacts can't be exported, etc).

~~~
Firehed
Interesting point, although I don't consider email a platform like I do
Facebook or Twitter. While there's no central database, there's a means of
determining where the right server to talk to lives attached to the username.

We'd need some sort of DNS-for-handles in order to implement something similar
for a new protocol, unless you want your handle tied to a domain (in which
case you've just remade email with a RESTful API and a length limit)

~~~
streptomycin
Look into StatusNet, it's a solved problem.

------
efsavage
Twitter isn't very big in my circles, but of those that use it, _none_ of them
use the website.

~~~
smacktoward
And this is why Twitter wants to kill the third-party clients. Twitter has
decided that ads are going to be its revenue stream. The only way they can
guarantee you see their ads is if you use the website or an official client.
If nobody uses those, nobody sees the ads, so Twitter makes no revenue. So
they have to get your friends onto the website or an official client to stay
alive.

This logic assumes, of course, that Twitter's web app and official clients are
good enough substitutes for the third-party clients that if the third parties
go away people will use the official clients rather than just stop using
Twitter altogether. Which remains to be seen.

------
littlejim84
Couldn't Twitter just arrange a price for "business" usage of their API? The
main people getting affected by this are other clients or other intensive uses
of their API, but those very people are most probably trying to make a profit
themselves (HootSuite for example) so why not just charge for the API and so
leave the restricted API for free use. Or am I missing the point?

------
dchuk
"In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social
analytics”, and “Social influence ranking”."

Not bullshit, these are demonstrably useful products for people who want to
utilize new traffic sources in the interest of making money or growing their
business.

"But services like Storify and Favstar, which are actually useful and/or fun,
those are no good."

ummm...ok? Utility is in the eye of the beholder...Twitter is a B2C product,
so they're going to try and limit the number of competing services that are
stealing B2C market share from them (why would you expect them to be ok with
people using alternative Twitter apps instead of the official one?)

Now, Twitter is not a B2B company, so it makes sense that they would allow
those types of services to continue. It's quite possible they're allowing B2B
services that are utilizing the twitter platform to continue operating because
they plan to acquire a few of them in the future to try and actually make a
profit one day.

~~~
droob
This must be the Twitter analog to a Voight-Kampff test, because "social CRM"
and "social influence ranking" seem to me to be the fuel for spambots,
mindless marketing accounts, and other general filth. The MBA behind this plan
would probably stand outside his bakery demanding payment for people stealing
smells.

~~~
wmf
It's fun to bash social media douchebaggery, but I've come to the conclusion
that opting in to thinly-disguised ads might be the best use of Twitter. It's
not good for conversations (see Branch) or for actual socializing. I guess
Twitter is also kind of good for ranting, trolling, and bragging (see RKOI),
but those might be even less productive than advertising.

------
kintamanimatt
Why wouldn't they just just charge heavy non-client API users and offer
(cheap?) paid plans to users who want to use third party clients, leaving the
rest to use an ad-supported web interface? This is the best solution long term
which wouldn't really piss off anybody or nuke the ecosystem, while embracing
the realities of running a business.

------
masklinn
So from the "fantastic" quadrant scheme, basically they don't want users
(which they re-labelled as _consumers_ ) to actually use (engage with) the
service, instead they want:

1\. "consumers" to be analyzed

2\. Companies to use the service

Well at least it's rather clear what the new and future values of Twitter are.

~~~
ajanuary
It's not that they don't want users to engage with the service, it's that they
want as much control over that interaction as they can possibly get away with.

Cynically, the more garauntess they can give to the other three quadrants, the
more money they can make from them.

More positively, things like requiring reply/retweet/follow buttons with
embedded content encourages more interaction with the service.

If a (lazy) journalist makes up an article from collating a few tweets you're
now encouraged to reply, retweet and interact with twitter right there rather
than using the Facebook Connect comments system at the bottom of the page.

Their value to the other three quadrants is interactions. They're not stupid
enough to intentionally reduce that, though one could argue they're not going
about it the best way.

------
goronbjorn
Is this more evidence that they haven't completely figured out their own
business model yet?

------
nicholassmith
I don't know if this is the worst thing that Twitter could have done, but it's
probably fairly high up there. I wonder what people like Tapbot and thinking
right now, they're grandfathered in for some very, very specific agreements
but they know that one misstep and they'll end up out in the cold or paying a
fortune.

But then what does that mean for a Tweetbot user like myself? Less incremental
updates? One day the application breaks? Who knows, too early to tell.

I'm mostly surprised Twitter isn't just leveraging the fact they are pumping
out that many requests and slipping ads or promoted tweets or promoted
tweeters into the API stream and making cash off that. Seems like it'd make
sense.

------
shuzchen
I wonder if this is coming because they can't keep up with the write load. The
writes that come from these third party apps (that enable messaging multiple
people, or queuing/delaying tweets) might throw a wrench in their system if it
doesn't follow the natural usage they've designed it for.

The only other reason I can fathom why they would doing this is they
eventually intend to heavily push ads over their network, something that third
party apps could interfere with.

~~~
ajanuary
> I wonder if this is coming because they can't keep up with the write load.

Wouldn't an easier solution for that be to tighten the rate limiting for
posting?

> The only other reason I can fathom why they would doing this is they
> eventually intend to heavily push ads over their network

I think that's pretty much it.

------
Tichy
Why couldn't Microblogging work like email (or Macroblogging)? Some people
email through some provider or host their blogs at wordpress.com, others host
their own. Big bloggers pay a lot for their infrastructure, amateuer bloggers
get free blogs supported by ads.

Still not sure if Twitter isn't just blogs that include a friends list and a
reader (kind of like Tumblr, which seems to be taking off, too...). And the
short messages.

~~~
thinkingisfun
There is something like that, and it does work. But... does anyone know _more_
sites that support OStatus? I know of these:

<http://rstat.us/> <http://identi.ca/> <http://status.net/>

Which is nice, but not really much. Wouldn't it also make sense for, say,
Wordpress or phpBB (or any and all other blogging and forum software, these
are just examples), to also support OStatus? Everything that has content and
updates, basically. Why not build OStatus apps instead of Twitter apps? Am I
missing something?

Or are there other, similar standards/attempts? Because to be perfectly
honest, I STILL haven't found the tutorial that just "tells me what to do" to
go from offering an RSS feed to supporting OStatus, I'm kinda dense when it
comes to these things. I need code examples :/ It can be pseudo-code, but it
needs to be complete, instead of just a high-level verbal description ala
"first you implement subhubbub, oh, and then there is salmon". I digress, but
any and all hints would be appreciated. After all, it's for a good cause ^^

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radarsat1
Well it's not like alternatives don't exist. Of all the popular social media
services, twitter has got to be one of the easiest to reimplement, it's only
social inertia that keeps Twitter going. (Which says a lot about the power of
social inertia.)

As usual what is needed is a decentralized approach, but that always takes
time to catch on even if it can be made to work.

------
Sniffnoy
People keep talking about Facebook and Myspace, but they lack(ed) full-on
third-party clients, so what I'm wondering about is the LiveJournal
comparison.

LiveJournal too had and has third-party clients. And though hardly popular in
the English-speaking world these days, it's still going. But I don't think it
has similar guidelines. So what's the comparison?

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mmahemoff
_In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social
analytics”, and “Social influence ranking”_

Would he rather they put one-paragraph labels on each quadrant? Sometimes
phrases that sound like MBA buzzwords (and might be MBA buzzwords) are
actually useful too.

~~~
sillysaurus
I think he'd rather Twitter take a firm, unchanging stance as to their policy
toward third-party applications built on the Twitter-as-a-platform concept.
The buzzword-filled doublespeak in their blog post serves only one purpose: to
intimate change while keeping their future options open. Unfortunately, that
makes their policies (current or otherwise) about as firm as a loaf of bread.

~~~
mmahemoff
If so, he didn't express it that way. It just sounds like an unnecessary
sideswipe.

Anyway, I think the matrix does make it more clear than just saying "we don't
want 3rd party twitter clients...and some other stuff".

------
thirdsun
I always had the impression that bands and musicians made myspace what it was.
Seriously, they seemed to have every single band you could think of. That in
combination with the Google Search results deal (which still seems to be
running) was a winner.

------
dchest
Did anyone manage to extract API key from the official Twitter client?

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gcmartinelli
I wonder how Twitter's developers are feeling about these changes... Devs tend
to be pro-openess, I imagine this to have a bitter taste for most of them.

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jcromartie
Are people missing the fact that _existing_ Twitter clients can keep their
token allocation _and double it_? And new ones are limited to 100K only _by
default_ (they can ask for more)?

Since when did people consider unlimited access to Twitter's API an
unalienable right? It is _their_ platform, and _their_ API. It's also
completely free.

Twitter is absolutely free to limit usage of their own API however they wish.
If it means they want to change the rate limiting on their servers, I see no
problem with that.

~~~
dasil003
No one is arguing they aren't in their rights to do this. I mean sure a lot of
people are indignant about the fact that Twitter became what it was through
the ingenuity of the developer community, and without them Twitter would never
have grown to its current size, but that's neither here nor there.

The bottom line is that Twitter's communications make it clear that they are
grasping at straws for their profitability and that no developer is safe if
they think you are capturing too much value. Obviously you always run a risk
building on someone else's platform, but Twitter's direction and language
around this would make any developer a _fool_ to start anything new on that
platform.

~~~
jcromartie
But nothing, fundamentally, has changed. Twitter has _always_ been grasping at
straws for profitability, and they have _always_ been in control of their
platform. Would you have _not_ been a fool to build something on Twitter last
year? You would just be _betting_ that they wouldn't introduce limits in the
future, vs. knowing those limits today.

~~~
dasil003
Well it's been sort of clear which way the wind was blowing for a while now,
but definitely 3 or 4 years ago Twitter was bursting at the seems with
developer support for innovation in all directions. It was an extremely
welcoming platform compared to Facebook and iOS. Their developer PR has
completely reversed that.

Of course if you're cynical you could have called it from the very beginning,
but the point is it wasn't wholly unreasonable to believe that Twitter was
willing to let developers capture real value in exchange for becoming
gargantuan and providing critical infrastructure (ie. the old changing the
world thing). Whereas now it's very very clear that Twitter is not willing to
share any significant value. They want to capture it all, and they are
adjusting the ToS to put them in a position to cut people off at the knees the
minute they smell some value escaping from the ecosystem.

------
codegeek
Now I am convinced that I will never depend 100% on a third party platform/API
for a serious business.

------
seanp2k2
The reason: they found out that it's hard to make money when users can
trivially strip out your ads.

------
debacle
Twitter are being shits, but as a developer on the Twitter platform, what
could you really expect?

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smegel
If app.net gets the userbase, i.e. the people I want to follow, i will be over
there in a flash.

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taybin
Has anyone considered that twitter is actually pretty stupid?

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j45
If I can't use Hootsuite, I can't use twitter.

~~~
robinwarren
enterprise clients was one of the things in the 'good quadrants'. I'd assume
hootsuite may well fit that description.

~~~
j45
Hope so.. even if they have a high follower count

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ThePherocity
The writing is on the wall though; Kinda has been for a while. I think this is
why App.Net might actually get some traction. People will move when that's
where all the cool features are, and none of the crappy ads. Maybe.

------
paulhauggis
This is why I don't base my entire business on someone else's platform. They
could make one little change and destroy your entire business overnight.

------
macarthy12
I wonder if twitter have a $50 app.net account?

------
sailfrog
Grunter owns Twitter

