I feel like he has no intention of implementing this. It's all just justification for it to not hit up against an regulatory objections to combining the companies.
735 karma · joined April 23, 2007
Twitter recently stopped apps from offering any kind of bulk management services for Twitter accounts. We completely support Twitter trying to stop spam, but this action does nothing of the kind. Here's my full thoughts; http://blog.manageflitter.com/twitter-drowning-spam-why-thei...
Anyway the point of this service us just to point out how ridiculous the restrictions are. We will really be delivering it, however - the economics work. We're just finalising how we'll prove it's real people, most likely with a live stream going at all times.
Plenty of interesting ways that kind of bar could be included in a site.
One of the things I'm not so sure about is the local bindings for each language. I'm tempted to just use off-the-shelf HTTP clients or a very thin wrapper in each language and write code snippets based on them. I'm not sure I see the value in writing full client bindings - I've often found it harder to use in many cases when I use these 'opinionated' bindings in the past. You often end up with a choice of entirely following the libraries views on error handling or digging around and breaking upgrades by modifying these libraries directly. I've always preferred much thinner wrappers that have no knowledge of the underlying API calls. Would love more opinions!
The first barrier in social networks is people - getting enough people on your network to incentivize others to follow. Is the fact that app.net paid enough to draw people away from Twitter & Facebook? As a developer, perhaps, but as a user, I really doubt it.
A much better sales pitch would be just "you own your data". Give users amazing import/export tools from the get go. Allow third parties to fork your system and allow seamless user migration. Build a protocol, not a service.
With a business hat on, I also worry about the single silo of data in app.net. Say it does become successful, then they're a monopoly again. How can we be sure they'll fairly charge for their API usage when they realise how much it costs to hosts that much real time data? Can we be sure they won't change the playing field again?
Besides all that, I don't get why he wants $500,000 up front. If he wants to "align our financial incentives with members & developers", I would have thought he'd charge a set fee to allow revenue to scale with usage.
Also the language on the site is just so damn confusing. They have lots of ideas jammed in together. Most of the discussion about the idea has been people trying to figure out what they're on about. They need to figure out a sales pitch people can understand and stick to it.
Anyway, lots of huge holes in this implementation IMO. I doubt it'll even get funded.
It looks like it runs very similarly to our current server management systems, but the web UI is a huge plus.
I agree that open sourcing it to run on your own infrastructure would be a big benefit - people tend to be a bit protective of where they put their root ssh keys :)
I would never send an email that said "You fucking changed my CSS". It happens ALL the time to developers. In fact refactoring, telling each other what you think is wrong in the code and how to fix it is a core part of team software development. Nothing is ever perfect. You can't be that protective of any part of your product.
By the same token, I totally accept when the things I've spent hours pouring over get thrown out the door. We recently had a design review where someone said one of the elements I put hours into looked like a 3 year old had drawn it (they didn't know it was done by me, they thought it was outsourced). It was the kind of style I was going for, but that reaction made me realise it totally wasn't suitable for the site. I was a little hurt of-course, made a joke about it and brushed it off. We now have a completely new version of this page that's way better than my original vision.
Wrong response: “You fucking trimmed my copy.” “I don’t want to get mad but I sat there for FIVE HOURS crafting that yesterday, there’s a reason for every word.”
Right response: “I see you changed my copy. What improvements were you trying to make? I felt point x,y,z were important and you left them out. If you were trying to make it shorter, here's a shorter version that includes the more important points.“
Feedback, suggestions for improvement are very welcome :)
There's a lot of people over-reacting to this situation. If you read Twitter's blog post its clear that they're following up on enforcing the API "Rules of the Road" they've had for over a year. https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-twitter-e...
Section !.5. clearly lays out the rules clients must follow "Your Service may be an application or client that provides major components of a Twitter-like end user experience (a "Client"). An example of a Client is a downloadable application that displays user timelines and allows users to create and search for tweets. If so, certain additional terms apply, including:"
These rules are actually pretty generous and plainly lay out their expectations for third party applications. It's unclear what led to Tweets being removed from LinkedIn, my guess would be that Twitter attempted to enforce their branding rules, LinkedIn declined and instead said they would remove the Tweets from being displayed entirely. It doesn't sound like Twitter just cut off access to LinkedIn or came up with new restrictions they haven't already been publishing (and compelling 3rd parties to comply with) for a long time.
Any business must deal with existential threats, be it from competitors, regulation or bad investments. Building a business on top of an API is just another potential risk, you need to decide if they company in question is a safe enough bet to play on, just like you have to decide the same thing for all other risks.
Imagine that plugged into Google Glass. Overlay someone's heart rate next to their face while you're talking to them!
Facebook should add a clause to their ToS saying apps must actively ask for permission before posting. Twitter has done this and while there are a few bad smaller players, on the whole you don't see most apps using these spammy techniques.
I love that a funding announcement is so interesting that it will pull in tons of new customers.
Just shoot an email to jobs@89n.com and mention you're from HN!
However, on the ground here I don't just see the big guys. There a plenty of smaller bootstrapped companies that are genuinely innovative. I went to a startup expo at one of the uni's here last month and was completely blown away by the innovation of many of the smaller companies. If I had the money there's plenty I would be betting on.
"Just wait" is what I would say.
Instead of warning the public, that their records may have been compromised, they focused on me. I was immediately slapped with legal threats via phone, email and mail. They took my original email apart, saying that by modifying the url and downloading the database I had illegally obtained this data, I could be prosecuted under xyz law etc... They ended it by saying that if I ever spoke about it publicly I would be taken to court.
Needless to say I attempted to take my issue directly to several Australian newspapers. I talked to a couple, but none wrote a story. I don't understand why - this was 7 years ago, perhaps they didn't understand the issue. I spoke to a lawyer who told me that there was nothing I could do. They'd given me a way out so I should just take it and try to forget what happened. In the end I convinced myself that perhaps I was in the wrong. No one would listen to me. At the time I was a lot younger and had less resources. I would of course not deal with it the same way now. However, I'm not interesting in digging up the past - the proof is long gone, but the lesson stays the same.
There should be a government body to whom security breaches like these can be reported. Companies can not be trusted to police themselves when it comes to private data.
We check every 5 mins if you post frequently, progressively slowing out at around once every 20 mins currently. If traffic builds up we'll slow it down to max at around 1 hour.
I spent quite a bit of time getting the sharing correct - sharing Google+'s various data types is surprisingly hard to get right and make sure links go where you would expect them to.
Feedback welcome.