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Twitter Discards Client UI Community
Antique Geekmeister writes "Twitter has just decided to discard the community of developers who've created interesting and innovative UI applications. The announcement shows that they intend to switch from the 'bazaar' model of development to the 'cathedral,' with much tighter control of user interfaces for 'security' and 'consistency.'"
I'm pretty sure that there's no real value to Twitter, so why would it have a community?
And while you're at it, support more than 140 chars, or allow compression, or something.
What this really means is that Twitter doesn't want users to have clients that outright refuse to display Promoted Tweets or things like the #dickbar. Seems they are all about the money now...
This strange and sometimes lucrative process is known as "Applefication".
the regulations with regard to tweet semantics to protect the core Twitter experience
Oh dear.
OOI, are there any geeks left who do it for love of technology and challenge, or are they all money-grubbing lackeys to marketroids now?
The client variety for all tastes is what seems to have in part made Twitter so big.
It has unusually diverse clients, and has become a strong platform. And now they throw the "platform" part out to just make it a grey, boring old school software application with no reach for varying interests and usage scenarios in their community?
OK, well... It's their choice of course. But good job in trying to keep the extremely high popularity up. That's all I can say...
I think they'll need our best wishes.
Twitter was where many companies work their butts off to be. A company with their own client, but also a rich ecosystem of clients. Apparently, some don't like that, and *willingly* deconstruct their achievements.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I don't you read the article that well. This part in particular is troubling for a Twitter developer: "*The Opportunity for Developers* Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no. " Basically, they are saying, "Don't bother writing a Twitter client, ours is so much better than yours." Of course, the REALLY funny part is that Twitter just bought Atebits, rebranded Tweetie and turned that into their iPhone Twitter client. Can you honestly tell me that Twitterific or TweetDeck weren't easily as worthy? And since they've essentially kicked developers out of their primary bread and butter, what's to stop them from going after other areas involving Twitter? They already have an official URL shortening service, so it's only a matter of time before images and video are taken as well. It's the patented "Extend and Extinguish" model pioneered by another famous tech company we all know...
"If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve
your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you
do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user
experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of
Service. We have spoken with the major client applications in the Twitter
ecosystem about these needs on an ongoing basis, and will continue to ensure
a high bar is maintained. "
Sound like they are just setting some standards.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
FTA:
Seems to me that's saying that clients still exist, they're just being held to stricter standards. They'll only be discarding ones that don't follow their guidelines. Now I'm sure that means foisting all kinds of undesirable promotional crap on clients that can't be ignored, but it's not making clients obsolete.
the regulations with regard to tweet semantics to protect the core Twitter experience
Oh dear.
Exactly.. Was that for real?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
In defense of having their own url shortener, having multiple third party shorteners is a fucking stupid idea and should never have happened. The internet is a bad enough web of inter-tangled links as it is without introducing additional routing layers through unmoderated third parties who run a service which is very hard to monetise. (Because if I have to pay to make links, I won't make them. If I have to pay to view links, nobody will post them. If they serve ads, it's no longer a transparent forward and loses most of its appeal) That a third party service could die and take a huge chunk of the value of twitter's database with it is a terrifying thought, and shortening first party is the only reasonable way around it. It might be them being dicks, but it should have been there from the start.
That does it. I'm officially announcing I will no longer use twitter.
So anything except the official clients and some selected 3rd party clients will be banned?
Meh.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
Doesn't that comment belong in the TSA thread?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I reckon there is money in typos. People who enter the wrong shortcut and hit a landing page with advertising instead.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
OOI, are there any geeks left who do it for love of technology and challenge?
Yes, that would be the ones that aren't running or working for multi-million dollar corporations.
I wonder how this affects the twitter client built into and available out-of-the-box within Ubuntu.
The real issue here is that Twitter pushed the #dickbar onto an unsuspecting iOS world, and there was revolt, and mass emigration to third party clients.
Nooooes! Our users!
This is a stupid article. Read through TFA and you'll see they didn't do this at all. They tightened up the regulations with regard to tweet semantics to protect the core Twitter experience across multiple third-party apps.
I call shenanigans. If the "core Twitter experience" is so great, they wouldn't have to protect it - anything that broke it would die a painful, lonely, ugly death, since people wouldn't use it.
It's the same as Canonical changing the amazon affiliate id in the Banshee music player - another money-loser getting ready to "monetize".the end user.
You insensitive clods :(
All of the tools will likely still work with status.net , won't they?
Last time we heard of the Star Wars Emperor, he was thrown into a giant pit int the death star. Evidently he lived through that and runs application development at Twitter. Everyone was recently complaining about the dickbar? How about the dickedapp? Since Tweetie sold out, the app completely and totally sucks. If Twitter thinks they are going to force me to use that steaming pile, I will just leave Twitter. Twitter, quit the Evil Empire crap. Run the service and stfu!
Says Sarver:
So clearly one of their fears, perhaps for legal reasons, is getting their functions and widgets confused with, say, Facebook's. We all know how often YouTube and Facebook get mentioned in the same breath as Twitter (heed the great prophet Conan) but they are very much separate companies, and if there's even a chance they're stepping on Facebook's or any other's proprietaryGoodness(TM)* with software patents, DMCA, ACTA and such then I'm not sure twttr will want to take it. It also makes me wonder if Amazon.com asked Facebook before they made their own liker.
It all reminds me of, among other things, part of the Games for Windows Technical Requirements, a piece of terminology:
I definitely would not want to step on Nintendo's toes like that.** Last thing I want Mario to do is wear a black suit and hand me a C&D.
*Forgive me; it's what living in a world with a group called "comScore" does to me.
**My username aside, maybe.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
What strikes me as weird about this is that Twitter's own official app for iPhone started out as a 3rd party-developed application.
Ah Twitter. Once seemed so promising, now in decline as they try to jam sponsored tweets (i.e. spam) in front of their users eyeballs.
Nighty night.
Who did what now?
You mean the client UI's that weren't vulnerable to the Twitter XSS worm last year?
Ah, Twitter and Facebook. May I introduce those of you who haven't heard, to the future: 4chan and Diaspora. Also, contribute to Freedombox.
The announcement shows that they intend to switch from the 'bazaar' model of development to the 'cathedral,'
Software and cathedrals are much the same – first we build them, then we pray.
Hm... why the use of scare quotes in the OP?
So you're saying they're Twitter employees?
Tweetdeck isn't the only third-party developer who's been caught doing some smelly shit recently, either. Others have been whapped for inserting ads and hijacking users streams for self-promotion and spamming, which is probably the meat of what this is about, and not forcing trending ads or whatever is written on any given person's chunk of falling sky.
While I'm sure that the major motivations for this move goes around Twitter wanting to spam users with "promoted tweets" and such, as suggested by several other commenters above, I wonder to what degree they also feel threatened by the fact that their "new Twitter" web UI sucks so badly that many users don't want it. I tried the new UI for a little while, and found it confusing, waaay too busy, inconsistent and just generally horrible, and flipped back to the old UI.
Despite Twitter repeated entreaties to "upgrade to the new Twitter" - Why on Earth would anyone bother? This means that alternative UIs will definitely get a boost if Twitter decides to force their crapulatious "new UI" down our throats.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
Basically, they are saying, "Don't bother writing a Twitter client, ours is so much better than yours."
Their terms of service say quite the opposite, though:
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.
They do place restrictions on these clients, a few of which are potentially objectionable (particularly, you aren't allowed to use "data collected from end users of your Client to create or maintain a separate status update or social network database or service," which sounds like it might prevent, say, a client posting to Facebook and Twitter at the same time), but they're not banning them entirely.
You forgot to put "synergy" somewhere in there. No marketspeak is complete without synergy. Long live synergy!
They aren't "discarding" the community, rather they intend to more strongly enforce their TOS so things like twitter terminology stays at parity across all twitter apps.
Oh, in the early periods when the foundations of many software projects (and cathedrals) were laid down, the theoretical understanding of how to build foundations were severely or totally lacking, resulting in bodged-together lash-up unstable piles of masonry/ code.
See your "ha, ha" and raise you a "but serious".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
That's EXACTLY what this is about. Not cathedrals vs. bazaars, but willfully excluding competition (in a way that's already been ruled monopolistic in microsoft cases), in order to extinguish any possibility of a client that won't show adverts.
Seems like the time of http://identi.ca nad other Status.net-based social media comes, finally
The latest revision of the official Twitter iPhone app (the app formerly known as Tweetie) has location service on whenever it is in the foreground. There is no way to turn it off. There is nothing to indicate what it is doing with your location info. This coming so close to the deprecation of 3rd party apps is a really, really bad sign for where this company is going.
I will never use their iPhone app again because of this. The #dickbar is merely annoying, recording your location without consent is actively offensive to the point I'm rethinking using Twitter at all. It's not an idle threat - I haven't used Facebook in several months because of their awful attitude towards privacy.
And if a location-tracking app is the only one left, buh-bye Twitter.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.