
Twitter Gave Meerkat Two Hours’ Notice before Cutting Access - byoogle
http://www.fastcompany.com/3043716/sxsw/twitter-only-gave-meerkat-2-hours-notice-before-cutting-access-to-the-social-graph
======
tehwebguy
In case you are wondering what Meerkat actually did via Twitter's API:

\- Auto-follow @appmeerkat on twitter when you sign up

\- Auto-enable push notifications for @appmeerkat's tweets when you sign up

\- Auto-tweet when you schedule a stream

\- Auto-tweet when you start streaming

\- Auto-tweet when you comment on a stream

This is the entire disclosure they offered: "Everything that happens on
Meerkat happens on Twitter"

~~~
abalone
I think they prompt you follow, not auto-follow. At least I don't see
@appmeerkat in my followed.

~~~
faizmokhtar
Pretty sure they set it to autofollow by default.

~~~
madeofpalk
100% sure it's auto follow - I went searching for their twitter to see if they
had any news, and was surprised to find out I'm already following them.

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tptacek
The backstory here is that Meerkat downloaded users Twitter friend lists (or
"the Twitter social graph") and used it directly to send unsolicited messages
to them?

If so: burn them with fire.

~~~
harryh
AFAIK they did not, in fact, do this. Here is what they did do:

1) Say that you follow me on twitter.

2) You download and run meerkat

3) I download and run meerkat. At this point you get a push notification from
meerkat indicating that I've done this.

4) I start streaming on meerkat. At this point you receive a push notification
from meerkat indicating that I'm doing this.

At no time do I get anything about you (unless I'm also following you on
twitter).

I don't think meerkat did anything user hostile. But they did do something
that was hostile to twitter (given that twitter is apparently launching a
competitor) so it's no shock that they are getting cut off from the social
graph.

~~~
pbreit
Disagree. I think they abused Twitter and made twitter feeds noticeably worse.
All their tweets are essentially useless after a few moments and just litter
feds. I may be naive but I think if Meerkat was closer to following the rules
and respecting user feeds it wouldn't have been cutoff (i.e., Twitter's
supposed competitor was not the reason).

~~~
harryh
Given that twitter is a stream of a whole bunch of tweets each one of which
you can read really really fast, I've always been a bit confused by complaints
about useless tweets. Some fairly big % of your stream is always going to be
useless tweets. Has Meerkat really increased that percentage all that much?

I can see why people might disagree with me here though.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
> Some fairly big % of your stream is always going to be useless tweets. Has
> Meerkat really increased that percentage all that much?

Sounds like it. I unfollow people sending too large a % of useless tweets,
even if I find some of their feed interesting. And those were hand-written
tweets written without the benefit of spammy automation!

------
inthewoods
A counter argument: Uber breaks rules, a large number of people have no issue
with it and consider it fighting an unfair regulatory system. These guys break
the rules on Twitter and everyone sides with Twitter.

Now, I'm on the side of Twitter in this one, but I think it's an interesting
thought experiment. To me the difference is that they ended up bothering
Twitter's users (as seen by the comments on this thread), whereas Uber just
bothered cab drivers, cab company owners and medallion holders - a relatively
small audience that has pissed off a lot people.

There's also the issue of whether Twitter has a monopoly in the same sense
that the cab companies do.

~~~
pbreit
Because Meerkat made Twitter noticeably worse. All its notifications are
useless in a matter of seconds or minutes (vs revolutionizing transportation
to tremendous citizen delight).

~~~
inthewoods
Yes, but imagine if you owned a cab company in NYC or SF - how would you be
feeling?

~~~
marincounty
Or, you buy the Uber Driver pitch and buy a Uber approved 4 door car, and find
you are working for less than minimum wage, or worse yet; you end up in
Bankruptcy court?

I don't care that Uber is providing competition--I just don't like their
business plan of hiring Drivers without any risk on their part. "Oh, but
you're an Independent Contractor, but you need to drive a certain year four
door car from our List.(A list that doesn't make a lot of sense? Oh yea, I
have found selling a four door car on the secondary market is harder than
selling a two door car; if your Uber job is not what they claimed?"

My point is I guess Uber provides great service for their customers, but I
question the great experience for the "Independent Contractors"?

Sorry, but I saw Uber and had to chime in. Back on track--Twitter--that
verification email I keep forgetting to fill out.

~~~
inthewoods
Interesting points - isn't that similar to how Twitter developers often feel?
I often see comments here about "Don't build a business around Twitter" \-
seems actually somewhat similar.

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rodgerd
> the Meerkat app will no longer be able to automatically push notifications
> that announce the live event to all of a Meerkater's Twitter followers.

Good. If "people I interact with twitter autospamming me every time they use
an unrelated service" becomes A Thing then I might as well not use twitter.

~~~
jusben1369
But how is this different to that person firing off a Tweet?

~~~
gfosco
There would be some content in the tweet, instead of an almost-assuredly dead
link.

------
steven2012
Anyone who builds applications built on Twitter's or Facebook's APIs deserves
whatever treatment they get.

I've never seen companies that treats their API partners with as much disdain
as those two companies.

------
fsniper
"I get it that when you own the house, you own the rules," Rubin says. "You
can say, I’m about to launch my own app, and I don’t want you to have the
graph. But I think the two hours was a little aggressive and not working
toward building a community." A little bit spot on. This is some kind of
bullying.

~~~
madsravn
"We are not naïve, we knew it was coming," Rubin tells Fast Company. "We
thought that we would at least get a week notice—a fair game"

He knew it was coming, he knew it was wrong. Why would he need more warning
than two hours? Why even a warning?

~~~
StavrosK
Nothing indicates that he knew it was "wrong", only that Twitter won't like
it.

~~~
tptacek
Among many problems: when applications exploit Twitter metadata to send
unwanted unsolicited messages, that makes users far less willing to
authenticate other apps to Twitter. I'm already paranoid about doing that (and
Facebook authentication), because who knows how the app will choose to
embarrass me?

~~~
comex
Yet somehow I think promising not to spam again would not provide a path
towards regaining access, post Periscope.

~~~
minimaxir
The bigger issue is that if there was no punishment, _everyone else_ would now
be trying to use the same tactics Meerkat did in order to spam people and
obtain growth, which _does_ result in a negative Twitter experience in the
long run.

Startups will probably still try to do it anyways, though.

------
fapjacks
Really, at this point, I think you're certifiably retarded if you build a
business even tangentially relying on Twitter or Facebook. This is exactly why
people stopped doing it _years_ ago. Why is this surprising to anyone?

~~~
supercoder
They aren't locked in to Twitter, they've just used it to jump start their
growth.

Can't argue it hasn't worked well for them with a lot of influential voice
talking about the app.

Not to say it will succeed in the long run, but in this case they could have
done a lot worse.

------
rdl
I wonder if they strategically waited to do this at SXSW, or if they just saw
abuse reach a critical point.

~~~
mhomde
Only if they strategically wanted to market Meerkat :) I had never heard of it
before and doubt I would have if it wasn't for this debacle

------
SG-
I don't quite get why it matters if he got 2 hours or a week. Was he going to
build a Twitter clone in that time?

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jim_greco
It's a cool app, but there's been a huge degradation of my stream now that
it's littered with |LIVE NOW| posts and out-of-context replies. Neither of
which is fixed by this unfortunately.

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comex
As much as Meerkat's spam tactics downgrade my level of sympathy, I still
think this is pretty awful behavior on Twitter's part. The list of people I
follow is, essentially, personal information about me and them, contributed by
me. I shouldn't be prevented from accessing my own information with the app or
service of my choice; it shouldn't be part of a corporate fiefdom.

Still waiting for the first attempt to test the legal waters on scraping
Twitter.

~~~
sehugg
I don't think Twitter has anything against scraping lists of followers of
public accounts -- after all, that's available to everyone. (One exception I
think is geolocation data which can't be stored.) It's then using that
information to spam Twitter itself that's the problem.

Facebook, OTOH, has pretty much turned off access to the friends graph for
apps other than games.

------
sehugg
No one likes spam, but invitation channels are certainly drying up. I
sometimes wonder how fast Facebook would have grown if email spam filtering in
2004 was as aggressive as it is today, especially considering that its early
growth was among .edu addresses.

(Remember that this was back before Gmail and often your email client did the
bulk of spam detection, if not all .. though my memory is a little rusty)

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bobbytherobot
Not that I care for what Meerkat was doing, but isn't this sort of a selling
point of Fabric?

------
beastman82
The original author included a misplaced modifier "only."

Despite their poor grammar it should have been included here.

------
marketcalls
So Now the Meerkat's awesome feature soon to get replicate by twitter itself?

------
ykumar6
I'm surprised they even got a notice

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bobofettfett
And it has nothing to do with Periscope.

------
paulhauggis
If you are going to use Twitter to grow your business, at least be a little
smarter about it. There are plenty of other ways to get yourself out there
over Twitter without spamming users.

~~~
jusben1369
Well in all fairness it seems like they're growing their business like crazy
but pre and post access.

