
I’m Done Developing for Twitter - aaronwhite
http://restrictionisexpression.com/post/26144987502/im-done-developing-for-twitter
======
cletus
What surprises me is not that a platform provider will do things in its own
interests, it's that people keep falling for it.

Seriously.

This isn't new eg [1].

Also, I don't really buy into the argument that these third-party providers is
what made Twitter popular. IMHO Twitter made Twitter popular and the devs just
followed the money.

[1]: [http://gigaom.com/2011/06/07/fred-wilson-to-devs-expect-
plat...](http://gigaom.com/2011/06/07/fred-wilson-to-devs-expect-platform-
owners-to-work-against-you/)

~~~
vibrunazo
Humans have extremely high tolerance to abuse. Many businesses have this as
their main pillar. Adobe famously continues to release worse and worse
experiences with their products, and still have a popular costumer base. The
masses simply have very low quality standards.

~~~
batista
> _Adobe famously continues to release worse and worse experiences with their
> products, and still have a popular costumer base._

Famously? Really? As in "some random non professional designers/adobe users
complained on the intertubes".

Care to mention how, say, Photoshop, Premmiere or Lightroom CS6 are worse than
previous versions? All have been praised as substantial updates.

Bonus points for not using non-technical catch-all words like "bloated".

I would aldo like to hear about the worthy replacement, with feature parity to
those products.

Abode products, due to the custom UI, have some odd look&feel issues in some
controls. They also have bugs like any program has (far less than most,
though, especially considering scope and complexity).

That said, they are the industry leading products, with no substitution that
has the same breadth for professional wokflows. So, no, its not about
"tolerance", its about being the "best game in town".

People jumped ship from Quark to inDesign in a heartbeat, when the option
emerged.

~~~
jasonlotito
Yeah. My wife uses Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and is moving to
Lightroom now, professionally, and loves Adobe's products. Oh, I'm sure she
has her gripes about certain things, but they work great. There are other
products. She used Aperture for a while (and still does, as I mentioned, she's
moving to Lightroom), but if you heard her tell it, it wasn't because Aperture
was better, it was just that she ended up learning that first. They are, in
essence, the same.

And when they are basically the same, the one that fits in with the entire
suite of applications she uses is one she will want to use more often.

Adobe does not begin with PDF's and end with Flash.

------
tibbon
Back in 2009, I was doing a lot of social network research with the Web
Ecology Project (<http://www.webecologyproject.org/>).

Among other things, we captured a 100% set of tweets surrounding the election
in Iran in 09, and released a paper on them. It was interesting, because it
ended up all being a bit of a precursor to the Arab Spring and many current
events in the middle east today.

I loved doing it. The API team was responsive, and although we were never able
to get full Firehose (despite offerring large amount of money) we were able to
easily play with and access a lot of data.

Much/all of that has changed. The API has gotten really complex to work with.
The terms of service are no longer friendly. Getting whitelisted accounts for
standard API calls is impossible, and overall feeling like we have any
influence or use to Twitter is dwindling.

Whereas at one point I felt it was a joy to work with, now I feel its
impossible. Getting the data to study is impossible (or expensive, since a few
companies control the firehose), and there's the constant feeling of getting
shut down at any moment. Plus, there's just too much data to grab given the
clunky methods you have to use to do it. I'd kill for a hard drive of the
'network graph' with diffs over time. As-is, its impossible to answer certain
academic questions.

To a certain degree, while Twitter is used far more now than in 2009, it feels
boring, obvious and less important to me. So at the end of the day, nothing of
value was lost, but I do miss it as it was interesting at one point.

------
demachina
I was kind of hoping Dorsey coming back to Twitter would have put an end to or
at least subdued their hostility to their developer community, but it doesn't
appear to be the case. Their new proprietary attachments are even more
concerning than this.

Costolo and Ev are dickish enough you expect crap from them, but Dorsey used
to have some hacker cool. I wonder if either Dorsey doesn't have enough power
to swing Twitter back to being open and cool again, or if he's drunk the rich
and famous Koolaid to the point he just wants to cash out in a big IPO and
doesn't care about the things he used to care about.

Regrettably companies trying to squeeze enough revenue out of "free" Internet
services to have a successful IPO are pretty much compelled to be complete
dicks, so its probably gonna happen.

It just kind of sucks that Twitter is the absolute coolest news stream there
is, there aren't any good replacements and you KNOW they are going to totally
wreck it by the time they IPO or within a year of going public and we are
going to all have to start over on some new "never heard of" clone. Then
repeat cycle endlessly every few years. Dave Winer will keep shouting to use
RSS but RSS completely sucks by comparison.

As an aside a few days ago I read New Yorker and some other mags were getting
weary of letting Flipbook scrape their content and were going to just put a
lead in and link users to their main web site through flipbook instead. I'm
thinking, wow that's what Twitter was already doing. I totally never
understood what Flipbook offered to justify the hype. A good Twitter stream in
a good client is infinitely better.

~~~
asto
You should try google+. I like it better than twitter and I use it primarily
as a news stream.

The only reason I don't use it more regularly is that they don't have a proper
API yet and therefore have no apps for my blackberry.

------
sequoia
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment...

The first app created a layer between twitter and its users which meant that
stripping ads would be trivial & likely universal (they don't put ads in 3rd
party app streams _yet_ but should they chose to this would stop them) and you
could be harvesting the analytics and user metainfo that twitter wants to sell
for ad-targeting against what they probably consider "their" content. I can
see how they would take exception to a service that allows users to _fully_
control their interaction with twitter; it could seem too much like "handing
the keys over" to a third party.

TweetFavor (ironically) seems that it would worsen the signal to noise ratio
that Proxlet aimed to improve. Friends turning themselves into voluntary
zombies in a twitter spam botnet? I know it's not actually that bad but I can
see why twitter would want to cut this off.

None of this excuses the manner with which twitter did what they did, and like
I said, "Devil's Advocate," neither of the apps were _that_ bad, but it's not
unfathomable to me why twitter would have a problem with them.

~~~
aaronwhite
Proxlet never made any attempt to block ads (they didn't even exist when we
built it!) That said, it's really no different than a normal 3rd party app
which could do the same thing. Again, my beef was the manner in which they
shut it down abruptly stranding users.

TweetFavor just supports an existing pattern "hey dude, can you tweet this for
me?" And permission had to be given per-tweet request, there was no mass
zombification. You'd pledge individual tweets. Once again, no reason as to why
it was shut down, and certainly no one used it before making the call.

------
mindcrime
_Moral of the story: be-wary of developing applications with dependency to a
platform_

Yep. Or at least "be-wary of developing applications with dependency to a
platform unless you control it, it's easily replicable, or you have a legally
binding SLA in place with the provider."

We're seeing more and more of this kind of thing, and people need to realize
that you can't build something sustainable by relying on the happenstance
goodwill of some arbitrary API provider.

~~~
mbesto
Thank you for this. It's not anecdotal to simply say "don't rely on
platforms". Be weary of platforms that are free. They do have risks. It's
important to understand those risks before thinking you've just hit a gold
mine.

~~~
genwin
I'd say avoid platforms that lock you in to that vendor, free or not. I've
read of paid accounts being shut down just as unceremoniously. Or prices were
increased 10X. Even when not locked in, one should be ready enough to move to
another vendor without too much problem.

~~~
incongruity
Well, if you're paying, you should at least have some sort of contractual
protection. If you don't, you're just a wallet to them, not a valued customer.

------
3riverdev
A group of us developed an app for published research work that used the
streaming API within academia. The amount of hoops we had to jump through for
the necessary access was absurd. It's as if the attitude is "it's a privilege
for you to use this API", as opposed to making it a viable platform.

------
kamau
They used to say this about Microsoft.
[http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace)

Now it can apply to any company that provides developers an API.

------
codgercoder
Sadly, I don't think there's any kind of "social contract" with web services
providing APIs. Just as the exploitation of crowdsourced data is now common
practice (including personal data), most organizations provide APIs only as
long as they find free access in their own interest. There's little loyalty or
feeling that they owe users anything, at all.

~~~
protomyth
In my most cynical moments, I think the business plan is to provide an API,
let it boost your services usage via 3rd party labor, get successful, then buy
what you want and lockout the rest.

~~~
mpclark
That's not in any way cynical; that's business.

~~~
protomyth
I don't think it is a good long term business plan. I believe you should
"dance with the one that brought you".

If this is all about advertising or branding, it is just sad and it makes it
harder for the people who actually care about their developers.

------
neehaha
Amateur question here. How does Twitter stop your app? Do they block your IP
from accessing their API?

~~~
aaronwhite
In order to interact with their API, you need a security token. They revoke
the rights on that token, and the API rejects your requests.

~~~
rhizome
And to put a finer point on it, tokenized APIs are basically whitelists.

------
bonaldi
and today they post this [https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-
twitter-e...](https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-twitter-
experience)

~~~
rhizome
Yet you'll notice that the only features they mention that people might build
upon are all features based upon contributions to Twitter itself, in the form
of either content (posting proxies) or analytic data ('like' buttons, embeds).
Consumption is left entirely out of the mix.

~~~
demachina
Yea, they want developers to develop content for them, and they want
developers to develop traffic for them. They absolutely dont want developers
to develop interesting clients and apps using for their message bus. Their
guidelines on displaying tweets are getting so restrictive its pointless to
develop anything resembling a client. Twitter has also proved to be
spectacularly bad at building clients themselves. I haven't been able to stand
any of the many iterations of their web site and their best client efforts
were just bought from the 3rd party developer community and then mangled.

Twitter should seriously consider just shutting down their API to third party
developers and restrict it entirely to their clients and widgets.

It would be a lot more intellectually honest thing to do versus just slowly
and continuously stangling their developer community in their quest for
revenue. If they just shut off the API then everyone would get the kick in the
pants they need to move on to something new.

The Internet community desperately needs to figure out a way to build an open
message bus + identity system + open API + server farm + spam killers using a
foundation along the lines of Wikipedia.

Letting one for profit company control the Internet's message bus has proven
to be a truly horrible idea. Going back to RSS and a totally decentralized
system not good either.

------
roguecoder
This is why open source triumphs in platform spaces: if your business relies
on another company's intellectual property it can be destroyed at any time.

------
iambot
Sad and disheartening. As someone who also hacks together the occasional
twitter app/hybrid, I wonder if this sentiment is widespread/growing?

------
apievangelist
What Twitter is doing is extremely damaging to developers and the perception
of APIs. But let's not bundle all APIs as terrible. The Twilio's, Stripe's and
other progressive APIs know how to treat devs and respect them. We just need
to make sure we are equally vocal about the good and the bad in the space.

~~~
jbigelow76
The difference between Twitter and Twilio or Stripe is that Twitter has a
product that exists outside their API. In the case of Stripe or Twilio their
API is their product, the dynamic between developers and the Twitter vs.
Twilio is going to be far different.

~~~
apievangelist
Agreed, but this distinction isn't made when bashing API opportunities. The
haters on this thread and others state developers are fools for depending on
APIs...not just APIs who have products that exist outside their APIs.

------
pimentel
If you base your app on 3rd party APIs, and charge users for using your app,
don't you have any liability in case the API shuts you off? Would a TOS clause
with something like "We will not be held responsible if our service providers
cease to function. Also no refunds." give any protection?

------
bobx11
A company you did not pay and do not help generate revenue (doesn't one of
them actually reduce ad impressions?) arbitrarily disconnected you from using
their server resources? Crazy talk...

~~~
ivankirigin
> do not help generate revenue

That isn't true. API apps drive engagement which helps retention to grow their
platform.

------
nnnnni
That is a horrible domain name. It's almost as bad as Experts Exchange before
they hyphenated it...

------
teeja
While you're at it, never commit your data to any proprietary application.

There, that's what 40 years taught me.

------
treelovinhippie
Not to mention the insanely low rate limits...

------
ascendant
Twitter gained a lot of popularity on the back of a vibrant third party
ecosystem. Now that they're established, it seems that the have deemed those
same third party developers a threat and have turned on them. Just another
example of why basing your company on someone else's platform is a bad idea.

~~~
wslh
The problem is: will we have real APIs in the future? because these APIs are a
kind of scam.

~~~
kintamanimatt
Perhaps they should be renamed to SPI - Service Programming Interface.

An API somewhat gives the impression of a programming interface that will
execute valid instructions unconditionally and reliably. An SPI is different
because it can fail, not because of a technical error, but because a human,
for grins or otherwise, decided to cause the failure.

------
drivebyacct2
> _Moral of the story: be-wary of developing applications with dependency to a
> platform._

I've come to the conclusion that this belongs in the category of "Make regular
backups" and "Use unique passwords and a password manager".

Everyone knows they should, and yet so many people refuse to accept that it
could happen to them. I don't know if it's hubris or arrogance. How many times
has this lesson been displayed in the last week on HN, let alone the last 4
years. iOS, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Twitter, often Facebook.

Not me! My app is too {small, unique, creative} to be a problem.

~~~
Karunamon
Sort of. Writing a program is usually a fun endeavor. Having the platform
owner come and stomp on you, regardless of how much right they have to do it,
is still a pretty shitty thing to do.

------
yashchandra
Exactly the reason why I am so paranoid about third party APIs. I even asked
this over a HN post here but did not get much response.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4162370>

------
sodelate
i'm done developing for SHINE

