

Twitter is a tragic tale - xivSolutions
http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/september/twittersEpitaph

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srs0001
I know this has been mentioned before, but Twitter should just charge for
access to their API. They are really squandering opportunities, and I hope
they will take a look in a new direction. Perhaps they could take a page from
LinkedIn as well, and offer premium accounts where they save every tweet.

Personally, I think Twitter Ads are useless. For the price, I would have a
hard time imagining that marketers would not get a better return out of
Adsense or FB Ads.

~~~
herval
Wouldn't that be the fastest way to kill any innovation at once? Paid APIs
aren't exactly the most popular thing out there (specially on consumer sites),
and I don't think enough people would pay for it/represent a sizeable chunk of
profit...

~~~
prostoalex
While Salesforce is not a pure model of a paid API, they're not exactly
unpopular.

When original Google Maps API came out, developers literally were begging
Google to introduce paid APIs for some of the stuff they were writing. I went
to a maps meetup in Sunnyvale, and that quickly became the subject of the
night.

Developers understand that paid APIs

(a) offer SLAs

(b) usually are not changed drastically, which for maps scenario allows
embedding them into hardware

(c) come with a phone number for emergency support

(d) hint at what developer's pricing schema should be (e.g. if API charges a
monthly subscription fee, makes sense to build the product around that, if
it's number of queries to the API, makes sense to incorporate the final
product into a few options for light, medium and heavy users).

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aneth4
An additional tragedy not mentioned is the broken circle of trust between
developers, users, and service providers.

In the future, developers will be more skeptical of promising platforms, and
users will be less willing to turn over their content and data to platforms
that may only temporarily in a state of free and openness.

On the bright side, this may lead to more explicit, contractual openness for
commercial platforms or the stronger emergence of completely open platforms as
users and developers learn the lesson that it matters.

Social startups might take this to heart - as Google and others already have.
Users and developers may well start to pay attention to that buried EULA and
its back-out provisions designed to make sure you can assure investors that
betraying your base for cash will always be a possibility.

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herval
As for IBM, its market cap is quite close to Microsoft, so I think they did
reasonably well (they could have done even better if they've bet on software
earlier, but that doesn't mean they should necessarily "bet outside their
walls"). Also, the fact that they invested everything they had on an "open"
platform (the PC architecture) is kind of an agreement to what you said they
should have done... No?

As for Twitter, I find it funny that people see it as such a revolution. I
mean, it's just a little social network with a very limited scope and
features... I don't jmagine it revolutionizing more than it already does (it's
a great outlet for the media, celebrities and breaking news, but I don't think
it's sooo much more)... Or is it? :)

~~~
xivSolutions
I think the limited scope of Twitter is/was one of the strengths of the
platform. Unlike the various walled gardens growing out of every corner,
trying to be everything to everyone, Twitter was very effective for a specific
style of communication.

They should monetize access to their API with some sort of tiered data-volume
scheme. Under a certain amount per month = free, over that, begins to incur
charges. They could also allow anyone to develop against it, with a license
which acknowledges a cut of revenue over a certain amount.

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sophacles
_They think that the only reason to create something is to make money. The
more money the better. They're not wrong._

Arrgh... no. There are lots of reasons to create things. The biggest being
personal gratification. The only reason to fund some creation is that long ago
someone noticed a correlation between giving people money to do their thing
and turning the results into profit.

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karterk
I wonder why Twitter has never tried to do anything interesting with all the
data they own. I can think of so many ways they can mine useful data from them
(think of brand sentiment analysis). Or - how about exposing metrics like
views, clicks etc. to businesses in a Pro account?

~~~
ams6110
Maybe because 95% of the data stream on Twitter is meaningless, random,
stream-of-consciousness stuff?

~~~
joezydeco
There are some that disagree that the noise is useless:

<http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003>

