
What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit - DaNmarner
http://www.marco.org/2012/11/16/twitter-being-a-dick-again
======
hnriot
*The effective rule, therefore, is even simpler: “Don’t build anything for Twitter.”

Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have.

What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a
special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to
do.

I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're
duplicating their functionality then it's perfectly reasonable of them to not
make any special exemption. If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new
markets or something that added value to Twitter then they'd likely give you a
higher limit, but that's not the case...

~~~
TeMPOraL
> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a
> special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed
> to do.

Native > Web, if you do it right. Web has a lot of UX limitations native apps
don't have.

~~~
qq66
That's why we (LiveLoop _) think Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc. will
all grow to encompass Web Service in the application itself, rather than being
replaced wholesale by Web apps the way Google wants you to.

_ LiveLoop is our PowerPoint plugin that makes presentations real-time
collaborative without ever having to leave Office -- available at
<http://getliveloop.com>

~~~
daleharvey
The line between web apps with offline capability and native apps with online
functionality is non existent.

Unless by native you mean written in a language that only works on a single
platform.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Of course the line is existent and it is clearly visible: the browser as a
general sucks in UX compared to what can you easily do with native API of your
platform.

------
jmilloy
_Twitter: Don't build core-feature Twitter clients, we probably won't approve
them.

Atta: I built a core-feature Twitter client!

Twitter: Sorry, we're not approving your core-feature Twitter client._

Who is surprised? How is this news? Were you expecting them to not apply their
own rules? It seems like a clear-cut case, and concluding "don't build
anything for Twitter" is just throwing a temper tantrum.

~~~
mcantelon
>concluding "don't build anything for Twitter" is just throwing a temper
tantrum.

Not really. They led people on, over the years, into building on their API.
People spent a lot of time and money building Twitter clients. Then they
pulled the rug out. Why would you build anything using an API that could get
arbitrarily locked down in the future?

~~~
jcromartie
The thing I don't get is: why build a Twitter client? Doing anything remotely
useful with Twitter involves building something really substantial on top of
the stream of tweets and users.

~~~
Firehed
Hardly. I find Twitter's official clients' UIs atrocious, and happily paid for
a third-party's implementation with roughly the same functionality (TweetBot,
if you care). I don't find data mining of mostly-mundane content terribly
interesting, with the exception of people posting photos of their debit cards
(<https://twitter.com/needadebitcard>)

~~~
dkersten
WTF? Why do people post photos of their debit cards online?!?

~~~
modarts
Haha, glad to see I wasn't the only one shocked by that. That's pretty
incredible actually.

~~~
Firehed
That's nothing compared to when one of the issuing banks @replied to the
person doing it, telling them to remember to set up online account access.

Yes, I'm serious.

------
nollidge
Sort of amused by the wording in this line:

> It does not appear that your service addresses an area that our current or
> future products do not already serve.

How can your future product _already_ serve an area?

~~~
jbenz
Shouldn't the real news today be that Twitter has invented time travel?

------
jusben1369
I've watched this from a distance with interest. Developers have a special
place within the overall Internet ecosystem. As a non developer, everything
Twitter has said and done in the last 12 months or more tells me "We don't
need a healthy 3rd party ecosystem and we don't want one. Hobbysits can stay
filling odd niche requirements and here's our cap. Everyone else though?
Sorry" I have no emotion around this as I'm not a developer. I feel as though
many developers can't wrap their mind around this concept of not being wanted.
They're used to being very wanted initially and then at best still wanted but
with a few controlling parameters around activity (see "all App
Store/Developer discussions"). I suspect it might be a slightly over
exaggerated sense of self importance that's meant it's taken a long time for
the obvious to set in. Perhaps that's why Marco only just connected the dots?
(as usual I'm not talking about all developers - I've seen many who got it
right from the get go)

~~~
jbail
I think "over exaggerated sense of self importance" is far from the crux of
this issue.

Developers are pissed off at Twitter for two main reasons:

1) Developers helped build Twitter as it exists today. With their hard work,
sleepless nights and toil, they created the ecosystem that allowed Twitter to
grow into the giant they are today. Now that Twitter is big, they are saying
thank you by more or less shutting down their API for any serious Twitter
integrations.

2) Twitter said, "we'll work with you" regarding API limits, but they didn't
mean it. People that built things in good faith are now realizing that Twitter
didn't act as such. If you put a lot of effort into building an app that
utilizes Twitter's API, you'd be rightly pissed about this too.

I agree that it may have taken a long time for "the obvious" to set in with
regards to Twitter not caring about their 3rd party developer ecosystem.
Hopefully, as the OP points out, its pretty obvious you'd be a fool to build
anything on Twitter anymore.

~~~
ableal
> Developers helped build Twitter

There were warnings about the fate of sharecroppers well before Twitter
existed:
[http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace)

Quote: _"It’s a lousy position to be in, because you’re never going to make
much, and if the land’s owner finds something better to do with the land,
you’re history."_

------
quotemstr
You know, back before APIs were all the rage, people wrote clients for web
services by scraping. Twitter really wouldn't be able to do anything about a
Twitter client that pretended to be IE9.

~~~
artursapek
I've had a bot blocked by Myspace when I resorted to that. They started
redirecting all my requests to " <http://google.com> ". And I was just working
on an old Thinkpad running Ubuntu server in my dorm room, so I have to think
blocking me was an automated response.

I'm sure Twitter knows how to block crawlers, especially ones that they're
actually aware of.

~~~
quotemstr
I'm sure Twitter would block bots doing unuserlike things. But isn't the point
of a Twitter client to do userlike things?

~~~
artursapek
I suppose, and I suppose if the client used a user's IP they couldn't block
them the same way. But wouldn't a client that scrapes the full HTML to get the
data you want be horribly inefficient, and hard to maintain? API's are all the
rage because they give you just what you want. Think about bandwidth.

~~~
wccrawford
Having written scrapers in the past, I can tell you that changes are usually
pretty easy to deal with. And if you write your scraper nicely, many small
changes won't even matter.

Since the client runs on the user's machine, performance isn't really an
issue, either. (Trying to do it for all users on a server is a different
story.)

APIs are indeed "all the rage" because they're easier and don't change as
much. But when given no other option... You do what you have to.

~~~
halter73
I think the obvious solution is to have the client first check for updated
scraping rules from a server operated by the client's creator. The client
could check for these scraping rule updates every time the client starts up or
on some interval (or maybe after certain errors even) and only pull down the
whole thing when the cache is invalidated. Then, as you suggest, the client
could do the actual scraping which would make it harder for twitter to block.

Not as straightforward as an API to be sure, but not impossible by a long
shot.

------
taude
While I've disagreed a lot with a lot of Marco's blog posts, gotta say he's
totally right on this one. Actually this is bigger than Twitter, as any new
platform that comes out that wants Devs to develop for their API needs to be
treated with a certain cynicism: if the platform gets big enough, they'll
likely cut you out.

I wonder if this trend between FB, Twitter, etc. is going to ruin the ability
for new companies and new platforms to attract free development by third
parties?

------
Pewpewarrows
If my salary depended on the Twitter API right now I'd be scared shitless.

~~~
hnriot
Unless you work for Twitter, I'd say you're right, and rightly so. Don't
depend on someone else's API, how many times must history repeat itself before
this message sinks in.

~~~
ghshephard
That's an unreasonable position to take. Almost all third-party software
products ever created rely on some other third-party APIs, and to suggest
"Don't depend on someone else's API" as a strategy would be akin to saying
"Don't write software for a living."

The challenge is to determine, in advance, if the platform you are writing for
will maintain some reasonable level of access to the API, both now, and in the
future.

~~~
wccrawford
Perhaps "don't depend on someone else's API unless you're paying for it" is a
better attitude. Depending on someone else to keep giving you something for
free is problematic at best.

~~~
ghshephard
That's not correct either. There are lots of free APIs that are reliably
stable, available, and profitable. Think about how many tens of billions of
dollars have been made writing to the win32 API. Likewise, the community of
GNU/Linux APIs (Perhaps the first time I've ever felt it was appropriate to
write GNU/Linux in a sentence :-) - glibc, etc...

The question you have to ask yourself is how much leverage the third-party has
over you if they decided they want to screw you over. Even still, you may want
to write for that platform if the $$$ is there. Look at iOS platform - Apple
totally owns you. Or, even better, look at the PS3/Wii/XBox platforms - the
owners of those APIs have even more control over what you can do - but still
very profitable platforms to develop for.

At the end of the day, a judgement call has to be made. No easy rules.

------
lancewiggs
It's so sad to watch such a lively lovely service remove the fun by destroying
the values that made it great. Meanwhile we are sitting here saying "charge us
money, you fools", and they are deaf to us. Twitter: your online site is
usability hell, your own clients are dated and painful. Above all we have one
question: why? Why are you intent on this path of foolishness based on placing
customers and developers last?

~~~
Skroob
Because their customers are advertisers, and their users are people who follow
Ashton Kutcher and Justin Bieber. It's not the same service as it was when it
started, when the API was important to them.

~~~
wmf
If Twitter charged to send tweets (like Facebook is now doing) then they
wouldn't need to crack down on third-party clients.

~~~
Skroob
But who wants to pay to tweet? With the business and culture they've built,
they don't have a way to go back. They have to stay free for everyone, they
have to show ads to make money, and they have to kill 3rd party apps to make
sure the ads get seen their way.

If you want Twitter-that-was, ADN is your best bet at this point.

------
uptown
Aside from pissing off Twitter, and possibly getting a cease and desist,
what's preventing developers from building a translator that sits between
Twitter's web layer and their native application client? Couldn't something be
developed that loads Twitter into a hidden webview that's locally scraped for
the purpose of re-display however the developer pleases on their client? This
implementation wouldn't require the tokens, and wouldn't be constrained by
their arbitrary limits.

But I suppose they'd just wind up getting sued.

~~~
zmmmmm
> But I suppose they'd just wind up getting sued

You answered your own question. People seem to be under the impression that
just because something is accessible with a web browser it no longer falls
under copyright and you can use it how you want. This has never been true. Any
web site can make a terms of use (and most do) that prohibit you scraping
their data.

~~~
uptown
So what about user style-sheets? They modify the appearance of the data, but
I've never seen anyone sued over it. Nobody sues IE for rendering HTML
differently. In this case it'd just be another 'browser'.

------
javajosh
Goddamn, I've never seen a clearer example of the colloquial term "butt hurt".
Twitter is a company, they built something, they support it, they have the
right to control it, and they have arbitrary rights over it. More tellingly,
they have a very good point.

It reminds me of the craigslist haters, and my response to them. I don't hate
craigslist for stopping third parties from using their data because, frankly,
it hurts their brand if "druggycriminalroommates.com" starts syndicating their
apartment ads.

That said, don't think that I'm some sort of right-wing capitalist fascist.
No, I don't think everything should be privately owned and controlled. There
are some things that should remain public: internet infrastructure being one
of them. My personal belief is that the only real egalitarian, open system is
one that relies on that infrastructure, and ONLY on that infrastructure. This
vision requires that people either a) run their own servers, or b) pay money
to someone else to run servers (or parts of servers). (Other possibilities for
payment exist, of course, such as bartering information for service, etc.)

I mean, twitter is free to control, the OP is free to complain about that
control, but the solution presented (don't develop anything for twitter) is
ridiculous and immature.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
A company builds an API and encourages lots of developers to use it across a
wide variety of projects, and they do. After achieving almost unprecedented
success in user adoption, the company decides to unilaterally change their
terms to say, "From this day on, not only do we want you to use our API only
in ways that drive value to us, we're not really down with you getting any
value in return beyond whatever value being able to say 'you can post to
Twitter from our app!' brings you." And they _are_ really down with screwing
over existing developers to bring them in line with the New Reality.

I'm pretty sure that I would, at that point, _not_ be keen on developing
anything that used that API, even if it complied with the new rules, because
the company has at that point demonstrated that they _will_ knife me in the
back if they think it's going to further their own business goals. How is that
reaction ridiculous and immature on my part?

~~~
javajosh
I don't know, I think it's stupid to allow any private company to control the
worlds data, as Twitter, Facebook, and to some extent Google are attempting to
do. To expect these for-profit companies to act in any way other than
"unilaterally" is naive. If you think that they violated the terms of service,
then you should sue them for fraud - or if that's too expensive, make it clear
that you think they are engaging in fraud.

Actually my message is this: build for the open web, and only the open web!
There is a lot of room in that space. Personally, I think that Twitter will go
bye bye and Facebook is going to get eroded by it. But that's my personal
belief.

~~~
pteredactyl
I blame Wall Street. Endless growth ($), forever.

I like the open web you allude to. However, bills gotta get paid.

~~~
javajosh
Well, Wall Street is a totally different problem - one that is essentially an
expression of systemic moral hazards that are present in our legal and banking
systems. Wealth = responsibility and yet people are content to just put their
money anywhere the return is highest. The result is Wall Street.

The open web is not at all anathema to making money! You say, "I like the open
web you allude to. However, bills gotta get paid" but would you have also
said, about interstate highways, "I like the highway system you allude to, but
bills gotta be paid"? No, of course not. Highways enable gobs and gobs of
business to be done. Twitter and facebook have built slightly more usable
highways alongside the public ones, called them free, and people have gone
there in droves. But once the true cost becomes realized, I think people will
go back to the public highways - especially when this means that can go
anywhere they want, however they want. Twitter is limiting clients, FB is
limiting reach. Both companies are merely very expensive usability innovators
on how users like to interact with the public web, in my opinion.

~~~
pteredactyl
I like your words. It's not a different problem. Doubly said "expression of
systemic moral hazards" leak into these successful platforms. They get fat and
then formally hire 1000x more inhouse devs, biz, and design folks when they
could ad hoc pay the people who were there from the beginning. Or new people
who spring up and bring the platform forward. It's creativity in contracts the
status quo is lacking.

I am curious - where are the "public highway" equivalents of Twitter or
Facebook? Who owns the infrastructure all this data is passed through? It's
definitely not publicly owned. In my opinion, your analogy is mismatched.

~~~
javajosh
TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP is the major part of the internet's virtual infrastructure
(although you might say that there are others, such as router configuration
protocols). The physical infrastructure is rather complicated, and owned by
large ISPs which connect to each other and smaller ISPs that connect to one or
more large ISPs. The 'last mile' provider collects money for access to this
infrastructure.

Free physical access is provided in the US by public libraries. De facto free
access is provided by a wide range of retail businesses, such as coffee shops.

With your own device connected to the internet you will have a NAT'd IP
address from which you can request anything you want. Unfortunately, until
IPv6 becomes commonplace, one has to jump through hoops to expose the device -
the most common being some form of dynamic DNS.

At the coffee shop the packets that your computer sends are travelling around
the world on de facto public infrastructure. It's true that a bad actor can
shut down routes, but the internet is rather cleverly designed to treat a
shutdown or reduction as "damage" and simply use a different route.

------
ianstallings
Wait, you mean you can't just wrap someone's service in a fancy UI and then
sell it as your own? OH THE HUMANITY!

What happened to innovation? All I see these days is a derivative of a
derivative of a derivative. Hell even the memes these days are derived from
other memes.

~~~
schiffern
> _just wrap someone's service in a fancy UI_

I thought we got over the "no value in UIs" bias when Apple made more money
than some small countries.

> _then sell it as your own_

1) Tweetro doesn't say "look at this great real-time messaging service we
made!" They built a UI. That's their value proposition.

2) Less importantly, Tweetro is free.

> _All I see these days is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative._

How is that uniquely "these days"?

------
koide
I wonder why something like "If you want more than 100k usernames, either pay
us $x per username or use our advertisement API and put whatever tweets/ads we
push where we tell you to" is not an option.

It would be refreshingly honest and for some people/clients it could work,
plus it could earn them some of the needed cash.

~~~
tinco
This doesn't work for them because Twitter has had 1.16 billion dollars in
funding.

Getting money from teeny little twitter apps is not the sort of plan they are
going to make that money back with. Imagine if they charged a buck per
username per year.

This would probably be enough money to put tweetro out of business (say 100k
dollar per year), but it would not come close to the amount of money they need
to make.

Even if something makes you good money, often you have to scrap it if it isn't
or even endangers your core product.

~~~
koide
True, you'd be left with "do the app like we tell you to" option, like
offering an API where's mandatory to show the sponsored content in specific,
Twitter approved ways.

It would probably be a nightmare to implement well.

A pity.

------
droithomme
> Now we know: “work with us directly” means “die”.

Very good summary by Marco. It's really annoying when these companies have
secret policies that have to be discovered rather than are clearly stated. It
just wastes people's time to try to discover the policy, having to do costly
time consuming experiments to find out what the policy is as if this was an
unknown branch of particle physics.

------
keithpeter
When you have to find 1500 monthly pay checks, I suppose you have to get the
money somehow.

[http://bijansabet.com/post/35849228202/the-first-photo-
the-t...](http://bijansabet.com/post/35849228202/the-first-photo-the-twitter-
team-prior-to-our)

Found via

[http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/november/howTechCompanies...](http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/november/howTechCompaniesGrow)

Seems a sensible position to me (old guy, non-coder and won't use twitter or
fb).

------
JohnTHaller
If you build a company around someone else's free API, you're either a high
stakes gambler or a moron.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Or out for a quick buck without any expectation to build a lasting business.

~~~
mattdeboard
How does this hold up when you're talking about web development, especially
javascript-heavy or -only applications? You live and die by the browser API
don't you?

~~~
pessimizer
Don't develop for the quirks of any particular browser.

~~~
mattdeboard
Except for when the browsers implement standards differently, e.g. appcache,
localstorage, etc.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I didn't know that different browsers implemented those things differently,
aside from the default and maximum amount of space given to localstorage.

------
zaidf
The problem with _core-twitter_ limitation is that twitter's own product sucks
and has basic features missing or implemented very poorly...years after
launch.

This is just shitty all around. Sometimes I wish I could buy 1,000 twitter
tokens for some price and use it in some "core-feature" 3rd party app because
twitter sucks at implementing the very core features.

------
ishansharma
This is really idiotic. What are they trying to do? Make sure that all the top
users flock to App.net or somewhere else?

~~~
JohnTHaller
Considering that I don't know a single real-life person that is on app.net, I
wouldn't consider it an alternative to anything.

~~~
swombat
The same used to be true of Twitter.

~~~
snowwrestler
Yes but early-days Twitter did not have to compete with current-day Twitter
when it was trying to grow.

~~~
anu_gupta
It had to compete with general ignorance of its value. Many would argue that's
a more difficult hurdle.

------
rubynerd
I agree with the "Don't build anything for twitter" motto (and it would look
good on a t-shirt), but part of me wonders if twitter could get by charging 25
cents a token past 100k, so developing apps is still possible, and twitter
still gets its slice of the pie.

Although, it still kills the advertising cash cow.

~~~
fbuilesv
I've always wondered why Twitter doesn't do something like this. Why wouldn't
they change their rules to something like: Once you have more than 100k users
you pay us 5-10% of every copy of your software sold. If your app's free then
you don't pay anything.

I'm pretty sure developers would agree to something like this and Twitter
could get some extra money that they're not getting right now.

~~~
pteredactyl
Yea, that's not a bad idea. But who knows what their actual revenue or capital
situation is. Just like Facebook, transparency is an issue.

I participate in these services, but I know full well whatever I post is
market research.

------
TheCapn
This is the inherent problem with building your product _with dependencies on
other products_. You are tied to their system in such a way that your
existence relies on the faith that they keep doing what they do and do not
change to a system that blocks you or inhibits your functions.

I see the need/desire for hackers to make things useful and unique in a way
that they envision things but you will never hear me apologize for my remarks
on this subject. If you are building your business or product depending on
someone else's and are not a form of contractual _partner_ you can be kicked
in the ass down the line and there's no accountability to you they owe.

------
rsaarelm
I liked the Internet better when we had things like irc and news to talk with
that weren't controlled by any single corporate entity.

------
ChuckMcM
It is surprising that their response does not include a call to action with
respect to their business development team. Why isn't there a 'click here to
sign up to by a 10,000,000 token' link in that email? Now granted the result
might be the same, people not developing for their API but at least they could
get value pricing information as part of the transaction.

------
jeremysmyth
Now that it has the userbase, it's milking its situation. The talk in the
beginning was "How are they gonna make money out of this?" and the answer is
gradually unfolding. Kudos to them or starting the way they did, shame on them
for closing out the very things that brought them to where they are.

Late arrivals like identi.ca might not be as polished, but they offer a
similar product, with open APIs. Being based on open and federated standards
like status.net, it's extremely unlikely that identi.ca will ever get the ego
trip twitter got, and in fact is much more likely that it will be more open
over time, and more useful even if other competition arises. What it doesn't
have, and what we (consumers as well as devs) can help with, is by heading
over there and giving them users and status and content.

------
k-mcgrady
I still don't understand why everyone is getting angry about this. It doesn't
affect clients made before they introduced the new rule. The only people who
get hurt are the idiots who ignore twitter and build a business which uses
their API in a way they have said not to.

------
SoftwareMaven
Not exactly. Twitter doesn't want you to build anything that will take a
single eyeball from them. There are still services that can be built that
don't fall in that category, though, such as sentiment analysis.

At least, for now. Twitter has shown they are willing to be hostile towards
their developers. Even if I fit in the "don't take their eyeballs" category, I
wouldn't build on their platform because I don't trust them.

------
babesh
How would you compare the Twitter ecosystem to how the Facebook ecosystem is
doing lately? Seems that Facebook sign on/identity is doing well. Seems that
the Facebook hosted apps are increasingly less relevant than apps just getting
sign on and possibly newsfeed flow? Twitter ecosystem seems pretty much
destroyed. Tweeting and Facebook newsfeed seem to be doing fine.

------
dpeck
I'm amazed we haven't seen some developer say screw it and build thing using
Twitters own keys. There have been multiple instances of them being published
over the last couple of years, and I'm having trouble seeing what incentive a
dev has not to just use them.

If you're working against Twitters interest already then why not go for broke?

------
yaix
> that our [...] future products do not already serve

wat?

------
nileshbhojani
Tweetro should be happy that Twitter is not blaming them for using their
platform in a way they prohibit. They want to use what Twitter has worked hard
to build, make easy money, and then also want Twitter to spend extra to help
them do it (by allowing more API calls etc) - why don't they build something
original?

------
TazeTSchnitzel
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned yet that Windows 8 has built-in Twitter
integration that works very well.

Why do you need another client? Just go to the People Hub and click What's
new. Need to reply or retweet? The buttons are right below the message. Need
to see mentions or replies? Click Notifications.

------
myWordBiLLY
So, based on their guideline, if we made and sold Twitter ID BiLLYS which are
custom made wooden signs for the or office (and BTW makes for a cool present),
would Twitter have a problem with this?

------
marblar
It seems to me this is an issue of pricing. Reach 100,000 tokens with demand
to spare? Congratulations, you left money on the table. Charge more next time.

------
kalleboo
I'd like to see what would happen if a third-party client just started to use
the API token extracted from the official client. What could they do?

~~~
vonuebelgarten
Technically nothing, I think. It will be nice to see clients with an option
"Use you own tokens" and the official client token widely available for use.

For instance, I'm thinking about this for my integrations -- that's a token
Twitter will never ban or throttle.

------
why-el
Does anybody know of any Facebook apps that sort of do the same thing, i.e.
recreate the Facebook newsfeed experience for users?

~~~
xuki
Shameless plug: <http://picaapp.com>. There are a few things we can't do due
to the API not available for 3rd party apps

~~~
why-el
Oh you guys are doing great work. I had a similar idea for a long time now, so
its good to see it executed. :) Quick question: Does the API allow you to do
interesting things with the newsfeed elements like tags and saving/searching?

------
smirksirlot
I think some people might call this "biting the hand that feeds you". Or at
least the hand that got you started.

~~~
mattdeboard
Others might call it "getting big-timed"

------
crististm
I don't understand why people bend over backward and provide also the grease
to FB, Tweeter, AppStore & co?

------
fidz
If developers are prohibited to develop apps with Twitter APIs, so why they
build the API?

------
camus
make the twitter api a paid api, and everything will be clearer.

Businesses that rely on twitter will have a contractual relationship with
twitter , meaning less uncertainty ,less competition ( since you'll have to
pay upfront to access twitter's data , less clients ).

That's the solution that makes sense , instead of this half baked situation
twitter api developers are in.

