
Twitter shut down Emojitracker's access - exolymph
https://medium.com/@mroth/u-1f647-person-bowing-deeply-5402c3ee5676#.z3df4bj6h
======
CoolAssPuppy
Hi, I'm Prashant. I run Developer Relations at Twitter. I want to clarify a
few things here.

In the past, Twitter had little formality associated with granting elevated
access. It was very much, "Hey, I want to do this cool thing!" "Okay, sure,
here you go." As Twitter's platform business has matured to include many
businesses building billions of dollars worth of social media monitoring and
other tools, we've formalized the process to becoming a Twitter Official
Partner (partners.twitter.com). Over the last six months, we've started
contacting all of those API key holders with elevated access and asked them to
clarify what they're doing. In some cases, we know the business and business
owner and reach out personally. In other cases, like this one, the business is
listed in our systems as "N/A", so we send the template mail.

In the email, we encourage people who believe their app is within the bounds
of acceptable use cases on Twitter to contact us directly, and provide a link
to do so. The owner of this app elected to blog publicly about the situation
before contacting us, which is unfortunate. We have contacted the owner of
this app and hope to resolve this situation, as we do with hundreds of other
developers on our platform. We do occasionally provide exceptions for apps
that are non-commercial (not-for-profit, no ads, etc.)

Note also that in this instance, the notice is NOT about shutting down this
app. It merely inquires about why the developer needs elevated access,
something that is typically reserved for our business partners.

None of this is related to continuing to use the Twitter API or our commitment
to enabling developers to build on our platform (Fabric, Gnip, our Ads
platform, and the Twitter API).

~~~
Bedon292
So, Twitter is allowing their head of Developer Relations to communicate, in
what appears to be an official response, under the name `CoolAssPuppy`?
Really? That doesn't seem right.

~~~
mynameisvlad
Considering that was probably his Twitter handle before joining Twitter, this
isn't shocking:
[https://twitter.com/CoolAssPuppy](https://twitter.com/CoolAssPuppy)

~~~
CoolAssPuppy
That's been my handle since AOL. :-)

~~~
voltagex_
Good to know my handle won't necessarily hold me back.

------
grandalf
I've often wondered why Twitter seems to do this again and again in spite of
what appears to be common sense and good stewardship of its platform and
ecosystem.

I think it's because Twitter is actually a successful, fairly open ecosystem
that attracts all kinds of use.

What seems like ham-handed or draconian decision making is just Twitter
misunderstanding its role as infrastructure provider.

What we all implicitly want from Twitter is for it to embody the values of net
neutrality. If someone can build something cool on top of Twitter, why not let
it happen?

Twitter's investors have pressured the company to monetize, and most of the
bad platform decisions seem to be tied to those efforts.

Twitter's folly is assuming that usage patterns are "bad". It should view all
usage in a content-neutral manner and provide and support APIs to let the
ecosystem grow.

It is the hubris of caring too much about content and content engagement
metrics that is driving this folly.

Twitter is a very simple broadcast graph. This is incredibly powerful, and
while it's not quite as lucrative to own as Facebook (with users habituated to
seeing the same boring stuff from the same boring people every day and
clicking on sponsored content), it's far more powerful and is likely to change
society more than other social media platforms.

All this is why Twitter should pivot and become a decentralized
infrastructure... of course this will never happen. I'm predicting that
Twitter will die a slow death as it tries to copy Facebook's revenue
generation approach. It is also copying Facebook's real name initiative by
caring too much about content attribution and verified accounts (which users
don't care about).

Eventually we may see a decentralized broadcast graph, but until then it makes
sense to expect Twitter to behave like a cognitively impaired dictator with
respect to its ecosystem.

I think most of this is driven by intense cost-cutting measures and intensely
misguided focus on revenue metrics in terms of content and engagement. Twitter
is not a product, it's an infrastructure.

~~~
dave2000
It's possible to over think things. Twitter exists to make money. They clearly
thought this change would cost them nothing, and would perhaps save them money
and effort. I don't think the "Twitter is a ..." thing has any relevance to
the decision making process. I can think of very few things, related to the
Internet, that haven't turned - or are not on the process of turning to -
shit. No matter how cool anything starts out being, eventually the original
developers sell it on or come up with stupid ideas and it gets ruined. It's
like some inescapable physical property.

~~~
grandalf
> Twitter exists to make money.

True, but for a platform business there has to be a correct recognition of the
relevant time horizon. Amazon's profitability numbers in its first decade
illustrate this.

~~~
dave2000
Surely the lesson from Amazon is that you can get by for a long time without
making loads of money, as long as you don't make stupid decisions, and get rid
of the consequences of stuff that didn't work out before it hurts you.

Twitter makes decisions that people on the internet grumble about and make
blog posts about and yes, even post on twitter about, but they still keep
using twitter, which is all twitter cares about.

~~~
grandalf
I think this oversimplifies things. If Twitter was making money we would not
see such turmoil in the team or so much floundering about revenue generation
tactics.

------
tangled_zans
This is just... wow. The guy spends three years developing a product on
Twitter's platform and they just kill it off with one e-mail? It's fair enough
if they need to change their API policy, but at the very least they could have
acknowledged all the work that he's done and found a way to help him and the
other developers in the same position to make the transition as painlessly as
possible. Not... whatever corporate BS this was.

Given how much Twitter is struggling already, is this really the time to be
alienating more of its community?

Personally, I've had a really nifty side project that I've been working on
since last year that I wanted to launch on Twitter's platform, but as of a
month ago I've all but given up on actively developing it. All the people that
I know on Twitter with whom I wanted to share it have either left already, or
are only sticking around because as-of-yet there's nowhere else to go that
does what Twitter does.

So I'm curious to hear some perspectives on this: clearly the direction that
Twitter has taken is making a lot of devs unhappy, but what would be the right
thing to do? What sort of API access would people ideally want to see it
provide? What would be the ideal best-case scenario necessary for the devs to
want to start coming back and putting their time into building the ecosystem?

------
aioprisan
Another example of Twitter taking steps to kill their platform dreams and push
developers away. So much for Jack's renewed push for improved developer
relations.

~~~
mattzito
This is a situation where one developer had a special exception carved out for
them for a non-commercial project that everyone thought was cool. That access
persisted for three years until someone made a decision that giving free
access to something that normally they charge quite a lot of money for is not
worth it.

Twitter offers several free endpoints for developers, including search,
streaming, a raw sample of tweets, and the like. They all have rate limits and
the like attached, but they're real, free, access to their data.

For people who want bigger, broader, deeper access, they sell access to that
data. That's been the case for the last few years.

In this case, Emojitracker unfortunately falls into the cracks in between,
where they need deeper access to do what they want, but it's not a commercial
enterprise.

I agree, it would be nice of Twitter to continue giving Emojitracker free
access, but are they _obligated_ to do that? They are a business, and
providing access to millions of Tweets for free seems like an unfair
obligation to ask them to continue indefinitely.

~~~
pyre
> They are a business, and providing access to millions of Tweets for free
> seems like an unfair obligation to ask them to continue indefinitely.

While not indefinitely, it would certainly help the case to just public a
cost-benefit analysis of how much Emojitracker's access was costing Twitter
(though not in terms of "lost revenue" based on what Emojitracker _would_ have
been paying for that access).

~~~
qubex
Who says they _didn 't_ perform the kind of cost/benefit analysis you mention
and estimated that it _wasn 't_ worth the effort? And if that was their
estimation, despite our (NH denizens) collective annoyance, maybe they were
right. Maybe providing free access made prospective paying customers less
likely to pay for firehose access, or a slew of not-for-profit organisations
requesting free firehose access citing emojitracker as a precedent. There's a
myriad of hypotheticals and whomever made this decision is not necessarily
irrational... it just depends on what constitutes their utility function.

~~~
pyre
I was saying that maybe it would have been a good idea for them to publish
that analysis publicly, or just to emojitracker (where they would presumably
publish it for Twitter).

------
subdane
I'm "confused," what in the world are we supposed to make of this tweet
[https://twitter.com/jack/status/693296738145140736](https://twitter.com/jack/status/693296738145140736)
and this statement? [http://recode.net/2015/10/21/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-
apologi...](http://recode.net/2015/10/21/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-apologized-
to-developers-for-past-confusion/)

~~~
aioprisan
It means Twitter as a platform company doesn't care about keeping successful
applications on their platform. Words (Tweets?) are cheap, actions speak
louder. In this case, it's a resounding and massive door closing on an
application that Jack said he loves and probably thought is/was good use of
the platform.

------
wslh
Three hours later and have you realized that CoolAssPuppy (Twitter itself)
hasn't answered any specific question? If you write in HN you expect a
conversation happening.

~~~
skeletonjelly
I used to subscribe to a service that emailed me when I got a response on HN
but that stopped for some reason. HN Notify I think it was called. What do
people use apart from refreshing their own comment pages?

~~~
kbenson
Dan Grossman, who's active in this very story, set up a replacement[1] a while
back that I've been using and it seems to work well.

1: [http://hnreplies.com/](http://hnreplies.com/)

~~~
skeletonjelly
Legend thank you!

------
JamesMcMinn
Everyone with elevated access is losing it in June as far as I'm aware - at
least that's the case for academic uses. There will be academic pricing for
Gnip, although we don't know how much it'll cost, I'm doubtful it'll be low
enough for most academics to afford.

They've been telling us that they planned to shut down free elevated access
down for well over a year now, so this doesn't come as a huge surprise.
Twitter seems to do regular audits like this, and at least for our academic
work, we've had to tell them what we're working on etc. every 6 months or so
to keep elevated access.

Having said that, looking at the volume of data that Emojitracker is pulling
down, it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to spread the tracking
over 2 or 3 separate connections. The UserStream API, whilst not designed for
server-to-server connections, would probably allow Emojitracker to spread the
~900 emoji they track over 3 streaming connections using only a single
account.

------
willu
I have no love for Twitter, Gnip, or the way they've treated API devs over the
years but this particular use case (ranking emojis by frequency of use) seems
like it could be just as well served by the free sampled stream. I can't
imagine anyone needing the _exact_ usage counts vs. the relative popularity.
Also, the author's stated goal of making it open and immediately usable by
other developers would be better served by using the access level that is
freely available to everyone.

~~~
TheHappyRock
Agreed, I don't think the full stream is needed either. It think being built
of the free stream will serve the needs of making it open and still provide
interesting data. Relative(sampling) usage graphs even seem more digestable
and interesting to me.

------
duaneb
> So even if Twitter were to give me free access to the Gnip APIs, others then
> wouldn’t be able to take my code and build upon it

I mean, isn't this the case anyway? Few people have "elevated access to the
Streaming API that Emojitracker depends on in order to operate at its high
volume"

------
TaylorGood
With @jack having tweeted about this just months ago, talk about an internal
disconnect..

------
rdl
Twitter fucked over every developer who trusted them a few years ago, and is
now trying to recast their business as developer tools and services (since the
core Twitter business probably is not a $20b business...). One of their
biggest roadblocks is getting developers to trust them again.

And then they do this?

~~~
x1024
The only way for them to get developers on their platform is to wait for the
next generation of developers. Literally nobody will base anything on their
stuff now, and this has been the case for a good few years.

------
kmfrk
I'm surprised there are still developers left for Twitter to piss off.

------
dajohnson89
Aw that's too bad, I just discovered Emojitracker yesterday and thought it was
really cool.

Also: is the service being removed colloquially known as the "Twitter
Firehose", or something else? I recently implemented a feature that uses the
standard rate-limited API. I went through a lot of pain to get the most out of
the rate limits. And people would always ask me "why don't you just get all
the tweets through the Streaming API?". I wonder if I had done that, how
screwed I would be now.

~~~
xutopia
What did emojitracker do?

~~~
NSAID
Emojitracker gives live, realtime usage numbers for all emoji used on twitter.

[http://emojitracker.com/](http://emojitracker.com/)

------
roosterjm2k2
This is a very entitled piece... and a very entitled thought process...

When you are using someone else's platform, they still make the rules... this
line in particular: "it wouldn’t help other developers who I believe deserve
to get the same level of opportunity as me." ... nobody "deserves" access to
any API... period.

I don't understand the entitlement in so many tech projects, who get upset
when a 3rd party they are freely using changes their service... you were never
entitled to it in the first place, you merely benefited from its existence and
should be appreciative of what you were allowed to do instead of feel entitled
to it.

~~~
mroth
Author here. To be clear, I don't believe I deserve free or special access to
anything. The point I was trying to make was actually more in the opposite
direction: I wouldn't want to receive free/special access as an exception now
simply because the project has become "famous", if the same opportunity
doesn't exist for other independent developers when their projects are
starting out -- I just want to encourage a level playing field.

(When Emojitracker originally received elevated access 3 years ago, the
project was not famous or well known at all, it was just a slightly more
formal version of Me saying: "hey check this out, I think this might be a cool
hack but I need access to 900 keywords instead of 400, that ok?" and Twitter:
"yeah cool, no problem dude.")

~~~
Bedon292
So you are still accessing the streaming endpoint, but you have more keywords
than they normally allow? So you are not accessing the entire Firehose and
parsing from there, right? Do you regularly update it to include new emoji
when they come out? I am thinking about ways to do it on the free stream
still, just trying to see where you are already at.

------
stevebmark
This makes sense to me. Granting free firehose access to a small, fun project
like this seems like unnecessary overhead for Twitter. I think their mistake
was granting it in the first place.

~~~
Razengan
Exactly. Wasn't HN almost unanimously in support of GitHub throttling
CocoaPods barely a week ago?

How is this any different? Honest question.

~~~
spriggan3
CocoaPods was throttled not shut down. Twitter has an history of shutting down
access to its API without notice or warning when a project becomes too
popular.

~~~
Razengan
What baffles me is that CocoaPods was actually providing something of value
and their usage fit in with the purpose of GitHub (serving code.)

EmojiTracker appears to be essentially frivolous and puts stress on Twitter's
platform for no good reason.

GitHub and Twitter both provided a free service and then modified it for a
specific user without warning. I would say throttling CocoaPod affected more
"legit" users than "shutting down" EmojiTracker did. (I put shutting down in
quotes because it seems EmojiTracker still has limited access to their API?)

How come Twitter gets called out as unconditionally Evil, yet GitHub was just
looking after itself?

------
grizzles
Why do people keep building stuff on Twitter? All the app developers that have
been fenced off should create a simple protocol to make Twitter irrelevent.
Brent Simmons suggested a great way do it awhile back:
[http://inessential.com/2012/06/29/matthew_on_twitter_restric...](http://inessential.com/2012/06/29/matthew_on_twitter_restrictions)

~~~
pmlnr
Why do people keep building stuff on any silo?

Take a look at Known ([https://withknown.com/](https://withknown.com/)) and
Woodwind ([https://woodwind.xyz/](https://woodwind.xyz/)): one to have an
actual website, the second to have a stream of content you want. Done.

Forget silos.

------
bobbyadamson
I don't understand why people continue to build things for services that have
a track record of shutting things down.

------
joeblau
Based on [http://www.emojitracker.com](http://www.emojitracker.com), there is
a lot of Joy, and Love on Twitter.

------
williamcotton
Is any of this to be expected? Twitter is a private company and they have to
create artificial scarcity to sell access to their platform. We still live in
a market economy, no matter how much everyone on Twitter would like to think
otherwise. They're just trying to pay the bills. Treating Twitter like a
public platform is a disservice both to actual public infrastructure as well
as the roll of private enterprise.

~~~
halestock
Twitter is a public company.

~~~
williamcotton
What you mean to say is Twitter is a publicly traded company owned and
operated by private individuals. Those private individuals have rights and
protections granted by the government jurisdictions in which Twitter operates.

------
egfx
I developed a product that connects Twitter and Facebook. I always thought
that Twitter would be the enabler because of it's open street like atmosphere
and Facebook would be difficult to work with because it was a walled garden.
The exact opposite was true. Over time, Twitter would get more restrictive and
difficult to work with while Facebook enhanced the look and feel of the stream
and how the tweets appeared, emphasizing and highlighting them.

In essence I think the product spoke to the nature of the whole issue. The
tweets left Twitter to seed Facebook with good interesting, connected data.
Twitter would know little about the context while Facebook would get enriched
context from the tweets.

Twitter doesn't want to be a dumb pipe to make apps smarter and better. They
want to be the bucket like Facebook.

------
spriggan3
At that point anybody whose business relies on Twitter "free API" deserves to
be in that situation. It's a well proven fact that Twitter will shut down
every 3rd party client or app based on their API which is a bit too popular.
Never build a business on top of a "free" API, especially Twitter, because
there is 100% chances Twitter will shut down you access.

------
jonesb6
Has anyone here built a product that relies on Twitter's API for business
critical features? How would you describe your risk tolerance, how long have
you been in business, and do you have a personal or professional relationship
with Twitter or Twitter's employees?

------
drinchev
Yeah. I was recently building a simple bot for Twitter ( a favor for a friend
of mine ). Things worked out, but everywhere I go I read "API Rate limited to
... per ..."

I know ... It's tremendous amount of data going on there, so I just don't want
to imagine how hard it is to scale it and offer that to everyone.

Nevertheless it's so sad that they break promises.

Twitter nowadays is a bot driven, marketing platform ( with some sort of
journalism touch ). I still remember the days that I was excited when I got a
new follower. Now I think it's just about "hashtags".

------
siegecraft
This just the extract value before exit phase, right?

