Twitter CEO Dorsey Apologizes to Developers
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* Sovereign from Mass Effect on using someone else's technology
"Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays,
our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths
we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You
exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."
Strangely, it seems to describe recent (2012/2013) situation with
API of Twitter perfectly."We have opened up our API, and have placed $5B in escrow with the Gates Foundation, who will return 70% of the investment income to Twitter. If we deny API access to developers before 2020, the Gates Foundation will keep the principal."
Someone sufficiently clever could make a similar, but perpetual, statement.
I still don't understand why people feel they are entitled to perpetual API access.
Maybe Twitter should follow the lead that I do - those that license and use many of my APIs pay on a royalty model - they pay a certain percentage of all revenue that their platform generates. Period.
And after that, Twitter felt like it's platform had been evolved by other people long enough and said "alright everyone, we don't want you anymore" and killed businesses overnight.
> And this is exactly how it should be. If you want to build your business on the back of someone else who is doing the heavy lifting,
In this case, it was a group of people who built twitter's business (and then their business) on top of the Twitter backbone. Put another way, Twitter wouldn't be what it is without the developers.
The side effect of all of this is that Twitter's innovation has since languished. They've settled into incremental changes such as the way you view hashtags of an event now. I get that that's not a trivial thing either, but their business model should have always been about increasing capabilities of Twitter's core based on what other developers made interesting (the retweet is an example of something like this done really well).
My first statement. It's about asking people to be not lazy. Twitter stepped in and thought "hmm we can't control our ad experience in a world like this so let's shut down the people who've built our business all these days"
That's lazy. That's the result of a bingo meeting that couldn't come to a conclusion on any alternative suggestion and instead opted to use a nuke.
If they really cared, they could have asked developers at the time. They had a great relationship then and they could have avoided this entire thing of asking developers for feedback now. They could have done that back then, and I'm sure people would have come up with great suggestions and compromises.
And the argument here is that once someone has a decent part of the market, they can't start eating the people that built the market for them ? Good luck with that one. Hell, it's Amazon's entire business plan (first, get everyone to use your platform by having ridiculously low margins, push every other distributor out of business, then, jack up prices), and I very much doubt Amazon is the only one doing so.
Maybe we should be arguing that Twitter's previous management simply weren't smart enough, and didn't find a proper way to monetize twitter yet. I do hope that is the case.
That said, I think there's a real opportunity for Twitter to grow via third party apps by being more open, they just haven't straddled the line of being both a consumer app and infrastructure company well previously.
I agree massively with lots of what Dustin Curtis has previously written about his vision for the platform:
"Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. Nothing great is Built On Twitter, even though it should be the most powerful realtime communications platform on Earth. There are simply no developer integration features for building stuff on top of Twitter as a platform, and that is absurd and disappointing. The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone. And yet the culture around the Twitter community has effectively banned such behavior because the product doesn’t have features to filter/organize such notifications."
They want the (hobbyist? / fun) apps yet, when something sizable comes along, the don't want someone else to run away with the ball. Coming out and saying to smaller indie developers now "If you build something decent, we'll take some revenue" I don't think would placate many. It may have been a decent way to start, but too much water under the bridge IMO.
How is it possible not to? Do you only write apps for your own OS or browser that you also wrote?
How is writing a "Twitter app" (if that becomes a thing) fundamentally different from writing an iOS app or a Windows app or a Chrome app?
And when the host eventually says "hey, come ride again" what else do you expect the response to be?
https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms
The most egregious of which continues to be: "Apps replicating Twitter’s core user experience (what we’ve called “traditional Twitter clients”) are discouraged and have a ceiling of 100,000 users, among other restrictions. Be sure to read the applicable TOS clauses carefully if you’re considering building such an app."
This is really bad as "core user experience" is something open to a very wide degree of interpretation.
The example responses they provide are correct... except when they aren't. They use heterogenous JSON in their responses (silently replacing string literals with arrays, but only for some responses, etc.). They've added error codes without updating the docs for months on end (which sort of defeats the point of an error code - what use is it if you don't know what the error means?)
The only way I'm notified of these changes is when people file bug reports with the library, and I always have to ask them to tell me the exact query that cause the error for them, because they're almost impossible to reproduce otherwise[0], and the API is so inconsistent that I can't try and manually search for similar responses that will cause the error.
On the other hand, the Twitter API is a seamless[1] way to interface with an incredibly useful and powerful product, and it's a great source of data. I just wish the developer experience were seamless.
[0] e.g. https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda/issues/82
[1] Assuming your client library works, but I can't assume that if I'm the one responsible for maintaining it!
That was a few years back, maybe they're better now. But I doubt it.
Both Facebook and Twitter are a complete dream compared to Valve's API for Steam and Team Fortress 2. Working with that is a complete nightmare, if it even provides a fraction of the capability you need (which it almost certainly does not).
The fact is, even with a large corp to corp relationship, you still can't absolutely rely on API consistency... it's pretty sad, but true... Netflix, Twitter, FB, Google and others have changed/revoked APIs before with minor to significant impace.
This is part of the reason why you shouldn't try to make applications designed to scale/adapt for years... design the simplest thing that does the job, and in as modular a way as possible. Avoid "enterprise" patterns as much as possible in favor of the simplest thing that works and is cheap/easy to replace if/when needed. It doesn't mean don't test, consider performance or write good code, just don't rely on it being around, and over-invest in that it likely won't.
You never know... a piece of software I once wrote to test our own product turned into its' own product and pieces of it are still in fortune 100 deployments... It's horrible, and was a hack to begin with. It didn't even support half the specification it was designed for (only the parts we needed)... just the same, it got the job done.
> changing it too often for my liking
Does not compute.
As others have said, I have had the misfortune of working on a project that used the FB API and relying on a feature that just inexplicably stopped working right around the time we were supposed to go live.
I was already personally uninterested in FB when this happened, but it gave me concrete belief of two very simple realisations:
- Tying your success to the whims of a third party company's developers is going to end in tears
- A motto like "Move fast and break stuff" is just an attempt to re-brand their fucking terrible development practices in a way that junior developers will treat as a positive thing.
IIRC he also had support for making requests/responses in your browser to test, but that could just be an idea that never got implemented.
They've always meant apps that offer more or less the same functionality as official Twitter clients.
For the people who actually read the terms instead of picking up their pitchforks back when Twitter had that big tos "change of heart" would have understood that They definitely could have handled it better and been clear that the user limit was really meant for Twitter-clones.
It's clear they want to control the way most people use Twitter, but also to show advertising. As best I can recall, the tos change came around the same time as they started putting in ads. Besides the few remaining twitter clones always play catchup when Twitter puts out new features (recent example; polls).
I don't. Could you articulate why you think its fair?
Huh? No, its not. What is fair has nothing to do with what is legal.
That would mean that if I wrote a Twitter clone that consumed 100x less memory and was much more performant, it would still be a "banned" application even when there is clear benefit for the users.
>been clear that the user limit was really meant for Twitter-clones.
Even if that was true, its backstabbing developers who are popularizing Twitter in their own way.
>Besides the few remaining twitter clones always play catchup when Twitter puts out new features (recent example; polls).
And why is that a problem? What if an app developer thinks that new features are not worth them spending development time/money on?
It would be like Apple forcing ios developers to support force touch if they want to continue selling their apps.
They have much much harsher ToS (and enforce them) than the discussed Twitter ones.
Seems like the field is a lot larger for iOS products, and that Apple wins either way (30% haircut on the app store), so maybe incentives for Apple are a bit more aligned then they are for twitter.
Which points to the fundamental thing twitter needs to do to get developers back on board: provide opportunities for both parties to make money. If Twitter was making a 30 cents every time a developer made 70 cents from the API, you can bet that that API would be protected and the developer respected.
Technically you're not prevented from doing so - you would just have to keep it to yourself (/family/friends/etc). Non-technical people rarely care about these things.
> backstabbing developers
I don't disagree. Would be interesting if there are any stats on who/what made Twitter popular, got any?
> And why is that a problem?
It's a problem for Twitter when you're trying to run a top-brand. Clients who don't keep up-to-date actually make Twitter look bad to the public. It also makes it harder for Twitter to innovate, move quickly (and probably get usage stats), without coordinating with external developers. Apple actually does (in some aspects) force developers to keep their apps up to date. I develop iOS apps and this actually consumes way more time than I wish it did.
Your concerns are valid from a third-party concern but from Twitter's first-party concern they are distractions.
Yes ! But shouldn't we let the users decide that? If one of the clients implements the newer features and users like them, they would switch to the other client. That is assuming Twitter believes in competition. This makes it seem like they want to eliminate competition and consolidate control. Its rather anti-capitalistic.
>Your concerns are valid from a third-party concern but from Twitter's first-party concern they are distractions.
Yes, I'm siding with with the third parties. Twitter is a giant company with a megaphone to make their argument anywhere they want. Personally, I don't think anyone should care about Twitter's bottom line except Twitter themselves.
No, it started out that way, but then the functionality of the official Twitter clients was expended, and then they redefined it to be so broad as to potentially hit anything that tweeted, and they they went farther still and started going after API keys for things that just consumed the data for their own ends.
Gitlab has a clear business model that works just fine even with the decentralized nature of Git. Nothing Twitter has tried to make money works at all if decentralized, or even if other people build clients for the same central server.
There are quite a few products that twitter could have made around twitter itself that they never even looked at. At the same time, their costs are exorbitantly high (see 'whatsapp' for a company that gets this right).
I don't think the situation for Twitter is as hopeless as it seems, but then again, I don't run Twitter so maybe that's just my naive optimism.
Orgs shouldn't have twitter accounts, they should have their own twitter/microblog services!
Besides, even with email, centralized email services that trust other centralized implementations (as well as properly administered servers that have the correct credentials, rather than blocklists) have done much to shield ordinary users from the problem, and spam is now less than 50% of all email, compared to 90% in 2009.
Abuse is a separate and tougher nut to crack, though.
Same way 3rd party developers helped originally grow twitter. A variety of twitter 3rd party tools drives user engagement with twitter. That data most likely has value that twitter simply hasn't figured out how to extract efficiently yet (slapping ads in the feed is an easy monetization strategy, not necessarily a good one).
If they required that developers with more than 100 users agree to pay $1:user:year, or %10 percent of gross receipts, whichever is greater, then app developers would have to have some means of making money, and the flowback would be to twitter, while still allowing for experimental apps to continue being developed.
Twitter cut off their nose despite their face here. Or for that matter, twitter itself could charge end users $10-15/year for being able to access their own account via API (anything but twitter's own client), and limit to X queries per day/month (something a real user is unlikely to exceed).. that would help keep the spam bots at bay.
They would still need to find a way to make money, which was exactly why Twitter started to limit the 3rd. party developers to begin with. They hoped that tighter control over their eco-system would help selling more ads.
What would developers build on top of Twitter that can make Twitter money? I don't question that you can build interesting and wonderful apps, using Twitter as infrastructure or as a data source, but that just burdens Twitter further. Either developers need to pay Twitter for access to their platform, or developers need to allow Twitter to push ads. Alternatively developers and Twitter can data-mine the crap out of their users and split the profit.
I just don't see what product Twitter could push that will cover their operational cost. Twitter is a publicly listed business, success is measured solely on profit.
Now, we also pull data from thousands of other providers, so it's not like we have all of our eggs in one basket, but we have a great business going where twitter is a significant percentage of the total volume of our data. Twitter also has certain advantages as a data source that many other providers don't.
A list of general suggestions for them: https://medium.com/@sthware/suggestions-for-twitter-hellowor...
Edit: I'll add that if relations get repaired now and then broken again, I don’t think they’ll be fixable a third time. They need to get this right, IMO.
That's just a fundamental lack of imagination.
There's all kinds of things that can be built on that, if you can rely on the platform to remain available to you.
Yet billions of dollars later and nobody there realised it? I can't imagine people there are so stupid and that they'd come read HN, smack they hand on their heads and say "Oh, we never knew, thanks HN commenters for saving us. We'll make a great profit and share it with you!".
But not to miss out, and join HN armchair analysts group, I for one, don't believe Twitter is that useful or valuable. Does it know what my neighbors are thinking? My boss? My grandma? Me? No, because I am not on Twitter, they are not.
I see a lot of garbage on Twitter usually. Silly status lines "mmm, yummy green salad!" or "what is the meaning of life..". Developers would do something like "Compiling takes too long, we need a new compiler!". And so on. Then of course it is the quintessential platform for spats and misunderstandings. It is hard to express ideas in 140 character lines so everything feels short, mean and snippy and people get into lengthy back and forths that are mostly stupid and pointless.
Is it impossible to monitise what they do? No, but I think it is not as clear-cut as it may seem.
I'm actually more inclined to tweet when I find something interesting... partly because looking at my own history works better than browser bookmarks at this point.. and partly because someone else might also find it interesting.
There is a popular twitter API endpoint which is undocumented and unsupported, yet insanely popular due to its functionality. It's the tweet-count-for-URL one; ex: https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www...
Twitter is now cancelling that endpoint (on 11/20) and recommending for thousands of developers to switch to their streams API for the functionality, which requires a program to maintain a constant socket connection and listen for filtered URLs to show up. Which, sure, that's a reasonable architecture for some cases.
However, what used to be a simple API-query-for-a-known-URL is now going to be a daemon program running 24/7 for months and months that listens to all of twitter for all conversations about the base domain, and then tries to emulate a count.
But...they really need to focus more both on the needs of their users, and even more so, developers. A simple example - I wanted to upload videos natively to Twitter (to surpass the limits that GIFs impose)+++. Its doable through an iPhone, but I no longer own one (+ you need to transfer the file to your iPhone, which is a bit of a hassle). I had to write my own script to accomplish this, and the API was anything but helpful in this process (I had to randomly tweak video settings until it would accept one of my videos).
+++ (Note that this is different from simply linking a Youtube video - twitter videos are auto-expanded and auto-play, which makes a huge difference for interactions in my experience). GIF limit is 5 MB IIRC, and video limit is 15 MB (and 15 MB / 30 seconds of video lets you show so much more than a 5 MB GIF). Script is here if anyone needs it (designed to run on a Mac, requires TWURL and Ruby): http://pastebin.com/45h1mx8s
There's a ton of people who seem to know what Twitter needs to do, except it's never things that translate to profit. Take your own example with videos. It would be nice feature, but it's just costing Twitter even more money.
Start charging the folks (businesses, media et cetera) that have a million+ followers, these entities can surely pay to get their microblog posts published.
Good point :)
I'd pay $10/month, easily, or even more - which is probably far more than I'm worth to Twitter as an ad viewer. Lets look at it from an ad perspective. I spent $50 in one day in a test run ad on Twitter that got me a couple hundred engagements (expanded views mostly) and a couple thousand impressions. On the other hand, one of my normal tweets (if it is any good) gets around 5x that reach, with a more targeted audience. So there is definitely some value in day-to-day usage that I am willing to pay for. I pay $10 a month to Twitch just to get rid of the ads, and I don't use twitch nearly as heavily, nor does it have as high a value to me.
For the ability to easily upload high quality videos to Twitter alone (with auto expand and auto play, minus sound of course), I'd easily pay the $10/month I pay to Vimeo right now.
I should add, Twitter isn't just about me spreading my word out, I get a ton of value as a consumer as well. The majority of projects I am interested in, I have learned about via Twitter. I have made more real-life friends (as in, people I have met in person) through Twitter, as compared to Facebook. I have helped other people succeed on Twitter by retweeting their campaigns. Etc... :)
- a visible "paid" status flag on accounts, like "verified"
- Payment status not necessarily linked to the account holder: anyone can pay for anyone's account, and a little effort should be made to normalise the idea that popular accounts should have their audience chip in.
- Paid accounts get higher status when dealing with abuse. In particular, users can set a flag for "ignore @ from non-paid users".
LinkedIn still has a key benefit of not being overly noisy and not having bots/spam accounts.
Twitter though makes it far easier to connect with the right sorts of people.
If Twitter can clean up the signal/noise ratio and help with killing off spam accounts and bots, I think its potential can only grow
[0] Application not being an "app", but more of a new way to use twitter.
Can developers trust Twitter this time?
Don't get me wrong, back while working at Klout we got to meet Jack Dorsey and he is intelligent and interesting. Personally I like him and have some respect for him.
With that said, CEO's don't stay forever so there are no guarantees about how long the reign of Jack will last. Since he won't always be in a position to make good on this promise, how can we trust? What is it actually worth?
Where is the olive branch? Words sound nice but I've learned to pay more attention to actions.
How about something like free firehose access or at least making it affordable for mere mortals? Just "turning the api back on" won't be enough to convince me to sink anymore dev time into $twtr.
"Nope, million bucks, besides, you couldn't possibly handle XX megabits of streaming data per second!!"
Every conversation I've had with anyone at Twitter.
It's also their only real product.
If you need programmatic access to data, the folks at Gnip will happily sell you the data you need, and at expensive-but-imo-reasonable rates.
If someone can't afford access to the firehose, then my guess is that they can't afford the infrastructure to consume the data anyway.
<Access denied - TOS violation>
AAAAARGH! Good grief!"
"Our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable. We want to come to you today and apologize for the confusion."
Yeah it was the "confusion" that was wrong. Nothing like apologizing but not admitting fault either. He's basically saying "we did the right thing, we just didn't communicate it clearly."
Twitter "hoses" developers all the time who were making money based on apps supporting Twitter. They "hose" the developer because Twitter would rather make that money instead of allowing others to, yet they then fail to capitalize on the vacuum they just created.
Over time, it's made Twitter a seemingly very unattractive platform to try to dev against. Twitter doesn't make much in terms of earnings on their own, it seems it would be in their best interest to allow an ecosystem around their platform.
Happens all the time. App.net was original an "app store" for facebook but they decided to make a competitor called App Center or something and told App.net they could either be acquired or shut down.
They do, but that doesn't slam the door shut on a developer/business purely for the sake of slamming the door shut on a developer/business.
From what I've seen, Facebook encourages API usage. Twitter encourages it until you make money, then they shut you down - often stating they're building a similar app/service and you'd be competing with them -- only then to never launch said app/service.
Twitter as a platform isn't worth much (as evidenced by year after year of not turning profits). The value in Twitter is the data - but they are locking it away.
Why not go the Google route and charge for API usage over a certain threshold. Twitter could stop caring what users do with the data, and make money as their ecosystem grows and becomes more successful.
I think this is what makes people so hostile towards Twitter.
Twitter neither clones successful services nor continues to run those they acquire. Instead they either shut them down, or acquire then shut them down - meanwhile completely missing opportunity after opportunity to capitalize on their massive ocean of data.
It seems, based on history, Twitter is not interested in running many services around the Twitter platform/API/data. Instead they really just want to be "Twitter".
I say, let them do what they do best - acquire data and build great API's. Let 3rd parties build Twitter's userbase and data, but charge them for access to the API. It's a simple monetization plan.
On the other hand, Facebook's earliest users were just college kids snapping pics of each other.
Well, according to Jack, we tell him what the steps are by including hashtag #helloworld in our tweets to @twitter. So...yeah. https://twitter.com/jack/status/656885664525357056
"Thank you for holding. You call is very important to us."
At least he didn't "blame the victim" and make like everything is the developers fault.
That being said, this event is a whole event focused around Twitter developers, and this was seriously just a 9 minute talk by the CEO about a general vision of Twitter, with a 60 second part of it about the "we screwed up" piece. I don't think it's an appropriate situation for a self-flagellation and introspection.
Since then they've gone through and talked about new APIs, new toolkits, new data sources, all for developers.
I get that they still want to control their platform and that is objectionable to some folks, but it's hard to argue that they're not doing anything with developers.
Then, a few years later, the state department says, "Oh shit, nevermind", and pulls everyone's car registration except for the state department manufactured cars. Chaos reigns. People are angry.
A couple of years later, there's a lot of hard feelings, but the state department has changed their tune a little bit. You still have to use the state department cars for your personal vehicles, but you can mod them a little bit, or you can attach trailers to them, or you can pay extra to drive bigger cars, or a lot more to drive 18 wheelers. They make money from these things, and commit to those options with contracts and guidance about what is allowed and what isn't allowed.
At that point the state department says, "Geez, we're real sorry that we didn't think about what we were doing before". They've already demonstrated that they walked back on their earlier policy, and they have set clear guidelines and boundaries about what they do and don't allow.
I realize you still might be mad if you don't want to drive your government-issued car on the road, and you're entitled to that feeling, but what more do you expect the state department to do in terms of apologizing?
It's difficult to understand what Twitter is even talking about.
Which is exactly why I am cautious about this. When Google gives away Google analytics for free, we trust that Google will rarely come after our small startup since they already have a very lucrative business model. We know that Google knows the risk of betraying their users is not worth the trouble (unless the opportunity is huge enough that they would actually want to take the risk, in which case it wouldn't matter anyway).
In case of Twitter we don't have that trust. Even looking at Fabric, I really think--as of today--it's really THE best analytics/crash report tool out there for app developers, but I also tend to think it's a trojan horse. It's obvious they are trying to penetrate developer mindshare AND their apps through Fabric. When you use Digits, you're basically outsourcing your user database to Twitter. When you use crashlytics for your social app, you're giving away all your user behavior to Twitter. I just hope Fabric came from Google instead of Twitter, for the same reason I don't use Parse from Facebook.
(Not saying twitter didn't deserve this)
If anyone has a real answer to this legal problem, please let me know. The EFF hasn't been taking it on.
The only saving grace for Facebook is all the great open source frameworks they've been sharing with the community.
I reckon twitter will merge with square and provide end-to-end advertising metrics for impressions --> clicks --> cart additions --> purchases. This will be valuable, and as much as I think twitter is silly, if they provide this they will do well.
Platform companies with stroes:
* Microsoft
* Google Play
* Apple
* [ empty ]
Super conflated and contrived appraisal here, but Twitter better post a strong offering in empty before facebook and they can't do that well without square and a platform or decentralized market. All this is to say, Twitter needs developers bad and to the extent they win them from Facebook and other platforms will be tied to the value they provide. I think that value will be provided by purchasing square in a merger of equals and building a dumb pipe platform, letting developers curate the content and providing stores.
We'll see what developer sentiment is, first few comments lead me to beleive it is not great.
I agree about the current state of developer sentiment. I think anyone who looks at a company like Microsoft will see that developer sentiment isn't static. Might take years for things to change but I commend them for taking the right first steps towards rectifying the situation.
This is the cart before the horse. They need to fix Twitter so that people want to develop for it again, not say "Hey, here's this downtrodden mess, come and make it better for us!"
The wisdom became "Don't build your business on another one." and twitter was the primary example of why not. For twitter to turn around and say "Ok, we made some mistakes, and we want to develop that trust again." is misunderstanding what happened.
twitter changed the conventional wisdom, not just wisdom about twitter.
That wisdom is WAY older than twitter. It may have become a fashionable meme again because of Twitter, but platform risk has been around probably about as long as computing. Certainly the idea goes back at least as far as the infamous DOS/Lotus 1-2-3 dustup. Google "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" for example. Note that whether or not Microsoft actually tried to break Lotus 1-2-3 isn't the point. I'm just saying people have been aware of, and talking about, these kinds of risks for a LONG time.
"The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Startups rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory they are extinguished. Lotus were not the first. They did not create the Platform. They did not forge the APIs. They merely found them - the legacy of my kind." - Twitter CEO in my twisted imagination.
- re-open the firehose. Let more people access it, even Gnip's (now Twitter's) competitor.
- remove the 100000+ users limit. Falcon Pro comes to mind, but since the author now works for Twitter, their are probably other good examples out there
- let developers monetize their apps using Twitter; maybe by providing a shared ads model.
That's not the end of it, but that would be a good start.
Company allows others to build cool things on top of it. Sounds good. Then others start making money from the stuff they build but Company isn't really making money and the others are selling because they are filling in Company's deficiencies around their product.
So how do you fix it so Company makes more money? Kill the others. That's why the first wave of stuff died on Twitter's platform.
So what's different now? Has Twitter figured out how to make money and fill in the gaps in Twitter? If they have then this could end up working out. If not, how could things be different this time around?
Color me skeptical.
It's not good enough for Twitter to "reset" the relationship. That ship has sailed. There's going to have to be some serious groveling, wildly-generous concessions, and guarantees of integrity moving forward if they want to recapture what they once had.
A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me
Satisfy me babyTwitter's attitude towards developers is potentially impacting the uptake of libraries like Fabric, despite having nothing to do with their API. What Twitter may have a shot at, as a result of this effort is to get usage of their libraries like Fabric on par standing ground with libraries and products like Parse from Facebook.
The question is, what has fundamentally changed about Twitter's business model that has now re-aligned its incentives to better match those of the developer community to enable them to make this promise today?
Anything?
Twitter is basically an inverted email system anyway. So there is no technical reason why it can't be structured more like email. They could make money like google does with gmail, but as a user I could sign up with any provider or even host my own server.
Then it might get interesting. To me the only thing twitter has of value is mind share ("tweet", "follow", etc...) and this approach is the only way they can leverage it to profit in the long run.
https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657073820801470464
https://twitter.com/nerdworldorder/status/657640450879332354
Twitter could have easily said "we will serve ads in this format. All apps that want to use the API must display the ads according to rules XYZ". Congrats! Now you can monetize and app developers can keep innovating.
The whole Twitter client fiasco remains one of the dumbest moves and for nonsensical reasons that Twitter itself could have easily solved.
I saw nothing in this announcement that addresses this problem or changes any policies related to it.
I'm curious why this kind of language hasn't fallen out of favor. It sounds so completely empty to me, I have to assume it does for everyone else.
Dorsey is making a smart move here but can it be reversed? When twitter started and now when it is down they wanted/want developers, back when it went gangbusters they booted the devs. Engineering lost control of twitter internally, developer love was the first to go.
It is time for Twitter and Dorsey to prove they've changed. Twitter will continue to fail without developer support. Look at how successful Facebook has been nurturing the developer community. Basically every site has a login with Facebook button now.
There are few remaining QNX developers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis#Ba...
In general, ya gotta be real careful. Somehow, you have to counteract the entity's supplier power with your very own buyer power. If you can't do that, you won't likely last. Or more specifically: whether or not you last will depend entirely on the other guy. It will have nothing to do with your own efforts (however vigorous), skill (however impressive), or cleverness (however clevererer).
One thing I know is irrelevant: whether or not you think the company will act as a 'good citizen'. Thinking about a company as if it were a person has little predictive value. Thinking about a company as if its 'Hal' from 2001 -- now we're talkin'. More like a clever psycho no conscience AI on a secret mission that it views as way more important than whatever you happen to be doing with your Saturday's -- that's more like it. This applies twice to public companies (like, remarkably, twitter) as by that point everyone takes the fiduciary thing really very quite most seriously.
Same problem they are facing with the massive number of users that tried Twitter and abandoned it. Much easier to acquire a new user than to re-acquire an old user that has already decided against.
Actions speak louder than words, no matter how small.
1. Allow devs to create third party twitter clients. No limits, no restrictions. The loss of dev trust is so big that they need to do something this huge. If they don't do this, I think Twitter will be forced to sell to a bigger company within 18 months.
Allowing third party twitter clients will quickly kill the official clients, as they're a heap of junk from a UX POV. It doesn't matter that Twitter won't control that. People who think this matters seem to think that Twitter is another Facebook. I can't emphasise strongly enough that Twitter is not a Facebook.
2. Make money selling licenses to third parties for data analysis. Change the licensing and make it cheaper. Make it affordable for small developers. Encourage an explosion of innovation in the way tweets are used. Work with these people to offer a better structure for tweets that will help them develop their applications. Then you're the data provider for a huge ecosystem, with a feedback loop that ensures the data increases in value over time.
People seem to not be able to find specific value in twitter's data, but I can see huge potential. Here are some no-brainer examples:
- emergency management (this is being done, all over the world, and it works)
- data-mining comments about companies for feedback.
- recommendation services.
I can think of much more valuable ideas, but as I know people working on startups in this area, I won't share them.
I also don't understand why Twitter have not "app"-ed their platform or partitioned it so that companies can have their own subplatforms. Maybe it's because the official clients are terrible at handling such data.
Man, I could go on... but what a challenge it will be to turn this mess into something meaningful.
I hope many people have instead learned to generalize the earlier message, in the last some years. Crudely but aptly stated: "Don't be a sharecropper."
Its been a long time since I really thought about building any business on quicksand.
Now a days when I use an external API, I make sure it is not core to the product. If the relationship changes with the external provider, I need an escape that does not impact my product.
Which means of course that the external API cannot be "essential" - and in startup land "not essential" == "do not do"
Twitter is foolish for trying to get this going again. The love affair ended, time for new things.
Still do, in fact. It's not like Twitter has done any of it.
But.
I. Simply. Can. Not. Trust. Twitter.
So, enjoy your floundering.
Well Twitter should embrace that fact instead pulling the plug on successful Twitter based products and offer paid plans for business who want to build on top of twitter.
An on-prem corporate twitter would actually be useful.
Let me know if they want to give contractual guarantees that certain APIs will be available.
I don't think the community of developers should be willing to work with Twitter going forward. they blew it. they've done nothing to earn a "reset" in their developer relations. if anything their product now is significantly worse and less appealing to integrate with than it has been in the past.
I mean ... you aren't ... mad ... bro?
Of course not. We're cool. Glad we had this talk.
I've built a few services using Twitter, Facebook and Google+ each time and I didn't have anything bad to say about Twitter, they were always the easiest to deal with.
It was appalling with developers of Twitter clients suddenly introducing harsher rate limiting, and a user cap per API key (meaning any growth in the app was severely limited, or even non-existent if already popular).
If you want to build your business on the back of someone else who is doing the heavy lifting, then don't be surprised when they rear up and no longer let you ride.
Maybe Twitter should follow the lead that I do - those that license and use many of my APIs pay on a royalty model - they pay a certain percentage of all revenue that their platform generates. Period.
I predict that Twitter will regress back to owning their platform after this minor blip.
The original article they reference is from 2012 and talks about the API changes and Twitter's choice to shut down apps it feels are competing with its own app.
All I got out of the current article was Jack trying to woo developers back without any hint of what exactly they're changing to be more developer friendly. If I was burned by them in 2012, I doubt this would get rid of any lingering doubts I had about working on their platform.
Swift death be to you, Twitter.
They'll match the sales that Salesforce had for fiscal 2014, within eight to ten quarters, even assuming slower growth.
Let the public access the THREE freaking floors of food in their HQ where each employee is required to act as a server (no pun) to customers for an hour or so a day.
The menu is a stream you follow, and you reply with "@table10 orders the tataki, chicken and veggies" and the SRE (service restaurant enabler) delivers the food while describing Flock...
In my view, Twitter = Yahoo. It won't die, it got there first, but it didn't really "get it", and so it will never win.
Twitter has a responsibility to its employees & shareholders to turn a profit. In some stages, courting developers will make sense, and in others, not. A lot of developers are taking it like a jilted lover. This is a business relationship, and it is neither personal nor permanent. If you can build on their platform today, reap the success while it lasts. For some of you, that uncertainty is not worth the investment. Great! Just stop expecting Twitter to sacrifice business health to keep one group of partners happy.
Yes, but fucking over developers is not, generally speaking, a good way to accomplish that end! That's the sad thing about all of this... Twitter haven't just been hosing developers, they've been hosing themselves by destroying the ecosystem around Twitter, thereby making Twitter less valuable.
We had a plan that would make them money - they without notice just killed our API access.
Why didn't they call us first?
Fuck that, not going near them.
This is especially true in that Twitter's mobile app has been terrible for many years. As Facebook and Google put tremendous resources into mobile, Twitter relied on high quality 3rd party apps like TweetBot while at the same time put ridiculous restrictions on them:
> Apps replicating Twitter’s core user experience (what we’ve called “traditional Twitter clients”) are discouraged and have a ceiling of 100,000 users, among other restrictions. Be sure to read the applicable TOS clauses carefully if you’re considering building such an app.
If twitter is so financially unhealthy that supporting platform would topple their 'business health,' then maybe their health wasn't that good to start with.
I think in a business relationship (just like in almost any relationship), you don't want to get screwed over. Developers got screwed over by Twitter.
You want this to be a business relationship? Then write out an SLA for developers. Otherwise apologizing and inviting developers is just lip service.
I love what they have done with open source, I just don't trust them enough to develop stuff on their api (short of twitter bots and the like).
Show me a company who will not screw you, given the right (wrong?) circumstance. Yet we must partner with some of them temporarily to succeed. We should be gambling on whether or not they can build a viable business going forward, not whether they will ditch us in tough times because they absolutely will.
"Morally bankrupt" is just an insulting way of saying the company is much more likely to abandon agreements, and will do so with weaker justification.
And plenty of companies won't ditch you in tough times. Imagine if insurance tried to just walk away when you filed a claim.
Now of course there is no legal obligation for a company not to screw over the developers they attract. But it is scummy, and your reputation will be tarnished. It is not the norm yet.
If everyone starts releasing APIs and screwing developers as soon as it is convenient for them, then attracting developers to future platforms will become more difficult in the future.
As it stands now, you'd have to be an idiot to trust Twitter again.
It's not the developers who are naive, it's Twitter. It's like Twitter is Lucy, promising not to take the football away again at the last minute, with Charlie Brown as the developers.
Only this time, Charlie Brown is going to take his football and go home. Fuck Lucy.