
The Twitter Platform - salar
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/05/twitter-platform.html
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AndrewWarner
Joel Spolsky said it best in his Mixergy interview:

basically, if you were a platform developer ... you're in a dangerous
position. You are snatching nickels in front of an oncoming bulldozer.

~~~
spencerfry
I've shared this feeling my entire life. I never really understood why anyone
would want to build a product on the back of someone else. This is going to
sound harsh, but it kind of feels like a cop out to me. And if not a cop out,
certainly ridiculously risky and limiting.

~~~
adriand
Every piece of software we write is built on the back of someone else. We're
all vulnerable to the whims of the people who build the operating systems, the
browsers, heck, even the protocols. The important question probably comes down
to ability and motive: "can this platform be turned against me, and do those
who control it gain some advantage from doing so?"

~~~
spencerfry
You're taking it too for to the extreme. Building on top of a browser or an
operating system is a proven and solid model. Building on top of another
software company, web app, etc., is a whole different ballgame. Web browsers
aren't going to turn against you. Other companies can.

~~~
steveklabnik
Maybe this is just my programmer mentality of making abstract connections
between things, but is building on top of another software company's platform
really all that new? What makes an operating system platform different than a
web platform, other than the fact that OSes have been around much longer?

Any business needs to mitigate risks, and I'm not trying to downplay that. You
can see this with Zynga and Facebook, for example. At the same time, you have
to remember that the platform is also a business, too. Platforms don't have a
business without customers to build on top of them.

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mootymoots
"There are over 100,000 applications leveraging the Twitter API"

That's probably evidence enough that investing in developing for Twitter is
kinda fruitless. There's just too much crud out there.

This coming from a Twitter iPhone app and web developer. Likely adding to the
crud...

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minalecs
fool me once, shame on you.. fool me twice, shame on me. By now we should
realize the pattern with twitter is that any company that adds real value to
twitter, they are more than willing to take the idea, and build a competing
service. Search, trends, ads, alt. clients, and url shorteners. They fooled us
all when they said they just wanted to be the pipe.

~~~
tansey
Why don't people patent their Twitter apps then? It may take three years
before you get it approved, but once it's in you can sue Twitter into oblivion
for stealing your idea, right?

~~~
nl
You can't just "patent an app"

If you have a patentable concept, perhaps - but even then, patents need to be
surprisingly specific. For a platform vendor like Twitter that makes it pretty
easy to work around their claims.

For example, if you managed to patent the idea of broadcasting advertisements
on twitter, the patent claim would probably have to say the method is
something like "insert advertisement using Twitter API". Twitter can work
around that by inserting the advertisement by other means.

In other words - don't waste you time with this strategy.

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chris24
The terms [1] were just updated to reflect these changes. There are some
interesting tidbits under the commercial use section, including: "In cases
where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising
sale, we require you to compensate us..."

[1] - <http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms>

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jimboyoungblood
They should call it the "twax".

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tomhogans
"Oh, paid tweets. That's a cool idea. We'll take over from here. Now get off
our service."

~~~
protomyth
That does seem to be the new business plan: 1) develop service, 2) let others
figure out a monetization strategy 3) do it yourself and change your TOS 4)
repeat from step 2

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maukdaddy
Makes for cheap R&D ;)

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alex1
This begs the question: how does Twitter define a "paid" tweet? Does payment
from advertiser to service or service to publisher matter? Do both? What about
Foursquare/Gowalla checkins? Would those count as "paid"? What if a business
rewards its mayor for all his checkins... do the mayor's tweets now count as
"paid"?

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patio11
Much like "How does Google define if a link is paid?", asking this question is
less useful than you'd think: they're under no particular obligation to have
consistent standards, enforce them without caprice, or avoid changing them on
a whim and/or retroactively.

Plus, even if your conduct is currently kosher, they can always invent a new
policy that you've already broken tomorrow.

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tlrobinson
"First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the
unique user experience Twitter has created."

Hmm this sounds familiar...

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timdorr
TL;DR - Fuck off, ad.ly

~~~
benatkin
Really? I wasn't quite sure what they meant by injecting ads into the
timeline. I thought it meant what the free version of Echofon does, IIRC,
which is take a friends_timeline and display it with ads in between, rather
than something that add advertisements to a user's statuses.

~~~
benatkin
I think they meant the twitter timeline and not the timeline in a user
interface. This article pretty much just says what the twitter blog post says,
but after reading it several times it sounds clear to me what they meant.

[http://www.socaltech.com/twitter_takes_aim_at_ad_ly_bans_in_...](http://www.socaltech.com/twitter_takes_aim_at_ad_ly_bans_in_stream_ads/s-0028798.html)

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zemaj
The more I think about this situation, the less I like it.

At first I was happy that the service I work on was not banned by this ToS
change. Even though we use twitter data for monetisation, we don't insert data
into timelines.

However, when I look at the services that have now been banned, I can't see
any warning signs other than that they were competing with Twitter for
monetising their data. This is what my service does. Even though it's not
currently banned, doesn't it make sense to abandon development now? The best I
can hope for it that it _isn't_ wildly successful, so Twitter doesn't consider
it competition...

Every time I read Twitter's explanation for the situation, it reads as "we
know our monetisation strategy can't compete with third parties in the short
term, so we're banning all competition". Hardly conducive to fostering the
best solutions, particularly when Twitter will always have the upper hand with
their "official" monetisation platform and analytics for resonance, anyway.
What's even worse is the the new ToS is _still_ completely ambiguous. Until I
saw Peter's post here I had no idea that the ban was only in the publishing
end, not insertion.

Of course all this makes sense from Twitter's perspective, but for third
parties... that just leaves us on an ever changing playing field with
invisible goals. I could have lived with rules and rev share additions, but
completely banning competition... not so much.

PS what's the point of this paragraph from the blog post? "We understand that
for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in
which they’ve invested time and money. We will continue to move as quickly as
we can to deliver the Annotations capability to the market so that developers
everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter
platform." a slap in the face? We understand that we've wasted your time and
money, so here's the next thing for you to waste time and money on. No
guarantees, no apologies.

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simonw
So I take it I was the only one who thought this was a strikingly clear
explanation of how Twitter sees itself and how they intend to develop their
ecosystem? A really excellent piece of communication.

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Sthorpe
Should be easy for Twitter to put a limit on the number of ads that will be
inserted during a period of time. Like build it into their API. API ads.

Kinda lame though. They could have just made it part of their TOS. Only X
number of ads can be shown after X tweets.

Twitter must have $$ in the eyes.

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jamiequint
Goodbye Ad.ly.

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khangtoh
Ad.ly and a bunch of other stream advertising solution are in a precarious
position.

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TotlolRon
Platform is becoming another name for Feudalism.

~~~
roc
More accurately: sharecropping.

