Hacker News Reader

Comment by gdudeman | Hacker News Reader

This is sort of a silly problem since Twitter started at 100% off-Twitter and has exceeded all predictions at bringing people into their own experience.

There are numerous, straightforward solutions to this. Twitter can require third party apps to show ads, for instance. Twitter can continue to copy functionality from third party apps and then squeeze them down. Or Twitter can worry about this once they are monetizing the bulk of their user base at 99% of the potential.

I think this is genuinely a challenge for Twitter to solve, but I suspect (hope!) internally they spend much more time worrying about getting more users, how to meaningfully innovate and how to make Twitter more essential for the majority of their "sometimes" users.

View on HN

The only trouble is that Twitter seems to be taking the opposite approach and blocking third party clients from functioning all together.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/twitte... http://mashable.com/2012/08/16/twitter-api-big-changes/

Not just do they put severe limits on how many users you can get, they also have strict limits on how you are allowed to display the tweets (most importantly you are not allowed to merge feeds from different social networks into the timeline) which means I can't make the app that I wanted (which would take all the users accounts and merge them together).

Their ability to do this, incidentally, is why I hate oAuth.

The simplest solution, honestly, is to just require an application token and bill based on API calls. The only issue is dealing with fraud but that is the same risk you deal with in any business.

IIRC you do need an app token to make requests to the Twitter API, at least for users' timelines. So like gdudeman said, the solution is straight forward - requiring third party apps to show promoted tweets is an easily solution to this problem. They would just include these promoted tweets in with the other tweets in the feed API endpoint (do they really not do this as it stands? Seems like such an obvious thing to do.) Perhaps there's a technical reason for them not doing this, or maybe it's political.

The problem is you can't guarentee apps will do that.

Then you ban those apps. Any app developer that's worth paying attention to will do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com