Another example of Twitter taking steps to kill their platform dreams and push developers away. So much for Jack's renewed push for improved developer relations.
Twitter offers several free endpoints for developers, including search, streaming, a raw sample of tweets, and the like. They all have rate limits and the like attached, but they're real, free, access to their data.
For people who want bigger, broader, deeper access, they sell access to that data. That's been the case for the last few years.
In this case, Emojitracker unfortunately falls into the cracks in between, where they need deeper access to do what they want, but it's not a commercial enterprise.
I agree, it would be nice of Twitter to continue giving Emojitracker free access, but are they obligated to do that? They are a business, and providing access to millions of Tweets for free seems like an unfair obligation to ask them to continue indefinitely.
While not indefinitely, it would certainly help the case to just public a cost-benefit analysis of how much Emojitracker's access was costing Twitter (though not in terms of "lost revenue" based on what Emojitracker would have been paying for that access).
But continuing to provide this noncommercial API access for free indefinitely is exactly what I think they should do and I'm a little disappointed that they don't agree. Twitter isn't wrong here, they're just assholes.
Because "special access" means free in this case.
Do you realize you are arguing that a customer should have free access forever, while others customers pay? Do you know what type of liability that is for any business?
Can I pay $ 100 extra per month for more access?
But no, I doubt you can pony up $100/mo and get a meaningful amount of data.
To get the data emojitracker has would be tens of thousands a month or more.
Right. The point here is that the decision might be stupid. It's fodder for exactly this type of a story, while Twitter is pushing for improved relations with developers and trying determine its future as a going concern.
Of course they aren't obligated to do continue to provide free access, in the same sense that I'm not obligated to use their platform. But it might be in their best interest (in both cases).
For all the acclaim that Mr. Dorsey gets as a CEO, Twitter is a great idea but a basket case of a public company.
But I think that a rich, robust ecosystem would flourish more around a platform that provided free API access to noncommercial projects.
Of course, it's conceivable that this API access costs twitter a significant amount of money - it is a lot of data, after all. Even a low cost could be written off as advertising within the platform. "Look at the cool stuff we could build on this API, let's make a commercial product and pay twitter for access!"
This. Also, if API access costs Twitter a significant amount of money, they shouldn't be in the platform business and shut down their API entirely.
It is a serious challenge that the data has some value, but that value is hard to extract usefully as a revenue stream. The emojitracker folks won't pay much, but offering it to them at a small rate vs a high rate to some other service has its own issues.
But since emojii tracker isn't real time, could they use a month old firehose? 6 months old? At some point the value of the firehose access falls off for "mainstream" users of that data, does it fall to a point where there is marginal value in giving free access to others on it? Even for small dollars?
Clearly as a public company Twitter has to do what it can to get good value for the assets it has created. That is a hard thing to do.
Twitter has "users" but those users are not the "customers". Twitter created a watering hole so that it could interest nearby predators in access to where the herbivores would be on hot days.
To be counter-pedantic (is that a word?) If there were anywhere else for Emojitracker to get their data, then I would agree with you that Twitter did not create it.
Flip that with Snapchat who 100% do know their users and converting them into customers.
http://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/is-snapchat-on-t...