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Twitter Restricts Client Developers
New submitter atsabig10fo writes "Twitter has finally released the hinted-at changes to their API, which include limiting the number of users for third party clients, per-endpoint rate limiting, and restrictions on how tweets can be displayed and posted. Twitter's Michael Sippey wrote, 'One of the key things we've learned over the past few years is that when developers begin to demand an increasingly high volume of API calls, we can guide them toward areas of value for users and their businesses. To that end, and similar to some other companies, we will require you to work with us directly if you believe your application will need more than one million individual user tokens.' Third party app developers are certainly going to be sweating these changes, and it puts the future of new development in question."
and should not the new icon for Twitter here be a bird in a cage?
"Hey guys, I've been thinking that maybe we need some new ideas on how to make our product less popular. Yeah, I know that we have to contend with network effects and a fairly strong first-mover advantage; but so did Myspace, we can do this, people! The service we offer is technologically totally fucking replaceable, and its continued viability depends on a pleasant UX for all the non-bots in our subscriber base."
"Say, your mention of UX gives me an idea... What if we were to start fucking around with the 3rd parties who produce the most popular interfaces to our product? If I remember, AOL's endless game of cat-and-mouse over OSCAR clients totally helped them retain relevance in the IM space..."
"Man, that is Genius! If we do this right, the name 'twitter' will come to mean 'Just like xmpp, only far less versatile and run by assholes' within the month. Get to it!"
Lets say you want to go over 100,000 users. Your application name is: Twitterextender. Just make Twitterextenderblack, Twitterextenderplus, SuperTwitterextender, etc etc. Make a new version for every 100,000 users you hit. Would this get around the arbitrary limit? They are different aps if you change the color and/or some trivial functionality.
I'm not sure why someone hasn't built a Twitter clone that just runs on top of IRC. Twitter is in many ways web IRC already.
"...we can guide them toward areas of value for users and their businesses..." = we can charge you money
. "To that end, ...we will require you to work with us directly..." =
therefore, we will charge you money
It's on the Internet, so both.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
It sounds like this might be in response to all of the reports of massive amounts of spam accounts: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/08/14/1851243/inside-the-real-economy-behind-fake-twitter-followers This might be one way to reduce the ease that the spam-twitter-herders work while at the same time providing a bit of income.
I have space for 1000 fruit. If I selectively pick 1000 apples, I still have a 1000 fruit.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
1. What sites are out there that implement OStatus? I know of
http://rstat.us/
http://identi.ca/
http://status.net/
2. What good and complete tutorials are there for implementing OSTatus? The ones I tried broke my brain. I want less theory and words, at least initially, and more (pseudo) code. Let's start simple: What do I need to do to make my CMS "folllowable" from the three sites above, for example? Too much theory makes me impatient, I need something simple that works and which I can enhance/refactor. So far, I'm stumped. Help? Any other ideas?
One thing is sure, Twitter has never been anything but shit, same for facebook, and app.net is just another dead end, too. So let's skip to the non-bullshit part, even though it's tedious and scary (certainly for me ^^), and get to the actual protocols that are not just a waste of time...
Why shouldn't [blogging or forum software of choice] support OStatus? Why should you not be able to "follow" posters, threads, categories or tags -- ? And if OStatus isn't good enough for that, what is, or how can we make it? I say "we", though I'm a shitty coder, but you get the idea.
In other words, if you build something like TweetBot (or Tweetie, which is now Twitter's official mobile client!), you can't get bigger than 100,000 users. So no point in spending time building a better Twitter client: if it's good enough to get used, it can't get used. This seems ... counterintuitive ... if your goal is to have a successful platform.
It does give clarity. It clarifies that Twitter is angering the very developers who are both motivated and capable of building a system to replace it. Also, this means that client innovation (the same innovation that brought hash tags, @ references and tweet discovery) will slow dramatically, which in turn opens up niches for competing services to capitalize on.
All in all, this smells like a huge error on their part.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Alright, so this is the part that baffles me:
Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience." And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.
Ok, so developers need to do something to differentiate. Got it.
We will require all applications that display Tweets to adhere to these. Among them: linking @usernames to the appropriate Twitter profile, displaying appropriate Tweet actions (e.g. Retweet, reply and favorite) and scaling display of Tweets appropriately based on the device. If your application displays Tweets to users, and it doesn't adhere to our Display Requirements, we reserve the right to revoke your application key.
Right! So developers shouldn't build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter experience - and instead they should differentiate by building apps that adhere strictly to the UI requirements. These requirements provide explicit detail as to how to create a client that mimics and reproduces the mainstream Twitter experience.
Wait, how's that again?
And this is why you should never base your business model atop someone else's product. Because that way your always at their whims.. I would only consider building atop another system if your life cycle (development and bringing to market ) is measured in months, and you have an exit plan ready to go.. otherwise get ready for restrictions once root company actually needs to make money and satisfy investors...
except you don't have space for 1000 fruit, you have pretty close to infinite space and you are artificially limiting selection to 1000 apples... also, don't you dare try to slip an orange in there, everyone knows apples are the king of fruits and everyone should therefore be happy to be restricted to just apples.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
I've had two ideas so far that might help address this.
First: correct me if I'm wrong, but if you're using an open source Twitter client, would you be able to obtain your own API key and use that? So, in theory, open source clients should have no trouble with the "no more than 100,000 users per API key" issue. Could even set up infrastructure for automatically distributing and using sets of API keys, no?
Second: if it gets too bad, switch from using "the twitter API" to "SMS". Just use SMS forwarding, point it at something like your Google Voice account, and forget there is an official "API".
(Or are they talking about killing the SMS gateway function too?)
That's just bad coding and there is no excuse. It doesn't help that the demo code snip-its from twitter et al are blocking javascript garbage, but any webdesigner or programmer worth their salt should be able to rewrite it into async non-blocking code in no time flat.
Twitter et al. should be providing decent code in the first place. They know a lot of people are going to be using the code as-is. Remember, a lot of web designers are not JavaScript experts. Dealing with synchronization is an intermediate to advanced level feature. You can't assume anyone who is writing any web page knows how to do it. And if it's so easy, why doesn't the demo code do it anyway?
Having lots of users is pretty pointless if very few of those users are seeing any adverts (because they access via third party clients)
If Twitter integrates ads directly into the message stream how would third party clients be blocking ads?
I know Twitter does this today (in at least the Twitter iOS client), I just don't know if ads actually go into the message stream for third party clients - but they could.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley