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Comment by dusing | Hacker News Reader

In what way are they good? How they provide revenue for twitter.

- Twitter could have turned the apps into a revenue opportunity (gate API access behind the paid Blue service for users, charge developers per user for API access)

- Twitter apps had the reputation at one point of being “UI playgrounds” — a good place for designers to experiment with different ideas around presentation of the feed; while Twitter didn’t directly benefit from it, these apps provided a massive amount of design iteration that enabled Twitter to steal the best ideas

Putting the API behind Twitter blue might not have worked. The paid badge has become a mark of derision amongst a portion of the user base.

It would go a long way towards making such a service acceptable ("I'm only paying for Blue for Tweetbot!"). The other option would be to charge developers for per-user access to the API, which developers could build into subscription payments (eg: Twitter could have charged Tapbots $2/user/month for access, so Tweetbot would have to charge their users $31+/year on iOS).

People are the product. If they are using the third-party apps they are producing content on the platform for others to engage with, which drives traffic to the site and allows for delivery of ads to others.

Just put the ads in their feed. Twitter makes no effort to target the ads as it is, so they can't be any less targeted.

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