Slashdot Mirror
Twitter To Developers: Please Love Us Again (mashable.com)
Twitter wants to fix its relationship with developers, it said Thursday. The company, which sold its developer platform to Google earlier this year, said moving forward it intends to be more transparent with developers and provide them with more insight. From a report: While some continue to call the end of Twitter (and others gave up on the product years ago), the company is prioritizing more tools for developers in order to grow the site. "These efforts represent a massive new engineering and product investment in the future of the Twitter API platform, and in our developer ecosystem," Andy Piper, Twitter's staff developer advocate, wrote in a blog post announcement. One of the steps involves creating an easier to use service overall. Twitter offers several developer products, including free APIs, services from data analysis group Gnip, and the enterprise-level Twitter API product. Twitter plans to simplify its offerings by releasing one way to get access to the Firehouse (access to all tweets in real-time), one way to access Twitter search, and one access for account activity.
Stop fucking around with the API and stop fucking around with access to it. You need to build trust and you can't do that when you change rules willy-nilly all the time.
The reason why developers fled your platform is because you never let it stabilize long enough for people to do things with it. Then, if memory serves, you closed it. And then you sold it.
So the question becomes one of why would anyone want to invest the time to figure the API and platform out if you're just going to pull the football away without warning?
Twitter, the problem is a fundamentally different one: Why bother with you?
Twitter was a very good platform to get points across quickly. You would say what you want and people could reply to it, could write short counterpoints to it, it was quite the place. A veritable "marketplace of ideas". And actually, the short format worked in the favor of this. Instead of writing an endless stream of words where the average reader's eyes glaze over somewhere in the middle (like, say, this wall of text here), you had to be terse and get your point across. Which allowed readers to quickly go down the list of replies and counterpoints, allowing a reader to get a really good grasp of a topic he was interested in and hearing many opinions, conflicting opinions that sometimes led to quite heated and interesting discussions.
That time is gone. Now that you can't even be sure anymore that you get to hear everyone. With shadowbans left and right, and some people outright getting banned to "make a point against different views, I mean, hate speech". Hate speech? Disagreeing with someone has become hate speech now? Don't get me wrong, if someone said that group X should be strung up, I could at least see the point, but we're talking about people whose "crime" was to disagree with someone and make them drop out of their echo chamber.
TL;DR: Twitter became irrelevant when not hurting someone's feelings became more important than hearing all sides of a story.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So ... both sides hate Twitter? A few postings up, we heard that it's just Trump's propaganda machine, here we get to learn that it's just Hillary's feel-good show.
Wow, even Fox News only managed to piss off one side of the political fence.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
One big problem with the Twitter API that I'm aware of is the requirement of an OAuth "consumer secret", which I've mentioned before.
Twitter's implementation of OAuth 1 requires each application to sign all requests with a private key that an application's developer is obligated to keep secret even from the application's users. This is fine for a web application that runs on a server. But a native application, particularly one distributed as free software, can't avoid exposing its private key to the user. Twitter can and does revoke keys that leak. Though most other services have switched to the more cookie-like OAuth 2 spec, which has an option to allow desktop applications to operate without a private key, Twitter has persisted in requiring this idiocy, which both the OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 RFCs discourage.
Does this new announcement include a move away from a mandatory "consumer secret" for applications that run on a desktop or mobile computer?
I honestly don't give a fuck what spectrum gets banned. For the record, I am a liberal. Leaning towards socialist even. Hey, I'm European, for the average American I'm probably a commie anyway.
But I DO want to hear what everyone has to say! Yes, that includes that I want you to be allowed that this Opportunist bastard should be dropped out of a plane without a parachute. I want you to be allowed to say that! I want you to be allowed to speak your mind, even if I think it's complete and utter bullshit!
I do reserve the right to reply to it, though. And I do expect that I get to be heard too. I am a firm believer in audiatur et altera pars, everyone has to be heard if you at least want to have a CHANCE to get to the true core of a problem.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To start with, Twitter did not sell off "their API". They sold Fabric which was a tool to help others with app development, not developer access to Twitter.
Secondly, as far as I knew the number one hugest blocker to Twitter API use was Twitter not letting new developers have more than a tiny amount of allowed API calls, or rules around how much a client could write anyway (as the article alludes to). In fact there was a huge Kickstarter campaign that succeeded in part because this is one of the few developers on earth that has a key that allows them much larger numbers of users to post tweets.
I personally have some fun ideas for Twitter use in apps I'd love to try. With access to Twitter via API being limited though, I will never put forth the effort into making them happen. So has Twitter (or all Twitter) finally let developers write REAL twitter clients again that any number of people can use?
If not good luck and thanks for all the fish.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have exactly the opposite problem I don't care what anyone thinks and I don't want to hear from any of them. Same result though....
love is just extroverted narcissism
You're in the minority now, sadly. I agree with what you're saying and I respect that sort of difference of opinion.
But you don't have to look far to find people who are trying to solve the problem of "abuse" by making sure some messages are never heard. I mean, just look at this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/02/unwanted-advances-on-campus-us-university-professor-laura-kipnis-interview
Unless perhaps I'm not keeping up and the Guardian is now considered Russian propaganda, it's quite dangerous to see how far this new trend has gone, wherein people find it injurious that they actually have to defend their (lack of) thinking and would much rather shut down all discussion via legal or extra-legal pathways.
Maybe, just maybe, so much of the media coverage of Trump is negative because the things his administration is doing (or not doing) are perceived negatively by a large part of the population. Maybe it's because numerous things Trump promised to accomplish "on day one," or in the first month of his term, or in the first 100 days of his term haven't been done. Maybe it's because Americans are figuring out they prefer having imperfect health care as opposed to none at all, they kinda like having clean water that isn't full of coal fly ash, and they need those Amtrak trains to get to work. Maybe it's because every single day, more shady connections between Russia and the Trump camp are revealed, and the administration bungles more cover-up attempts. Maybe it's because the president looks outright incompetent having his appointees continually resigning, getting fired, recusing themselves, and finding themselves under investigation by the FBI. Maybe it's because the public doesn't quite approve of Trump's nepotistic despotism, or the very troubling appearance that he's christened his son-in-law to do an end run around various posts that are supposed to require Congressional approval.
Nahhh, can't be any of that; it's the (((librul media globalist elites))) who are the problem, right?
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Remember when Twitter shut down access to 3rd party access?
http://www.digitaltrends.com/m...
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2...
http://news.softpedia.com/news...
http://www.eweek.com/developme...
Something i have to add:
Get your banning right!
Stop shadowbanning and throttling. If you do not have enough reasons to ban (or ban for a certain time) people, do not ban at all. Shadow Bans are a stupid concept, which only confuses people, what happend or if anything happend at all. Your service seems to be dysfunctional and the reaction is to see it as a broken technology. Be clear with your intent, ban people and tell them.
I have one account, which posted updates about a security related site. It is shadow banned. I have no idea why, but i guess it is because the site recommends adblockers as a security tool.
Stop requiring phone numbers for login:
A bouncing mail address results in a question to add the mobile number without any option to login with the e-mail address. You can suspend accounts, until they have a working communication connection (mail or sms), but allow the owner to login. Without mandatory phone number. Then allow him to add a working e-mail or phone number (but do not force him to use a phone number.
And stop breaking the web interface for (temporarily) suspended accounts.
When you have a suspended account for any reason, you cannot change settings, request your archive or even delete it!
You may argument about some things, but the possiblity to DELETE your data is a basic right in the web. When you decide some account should be suspended, the owner should be able to decide he doesn't need the account anyway.
Again it was only a technical reason, when i experienced it. I logged in into an old account just to delete it. The login (from another ip range than the old one) triggered the bot detection and got the account suspended. It thought no big deal, i wanted to delete it anyway. I tried requesting the archive. No, you cannot when the account is suspended. Okay, not that important ... so i wanted to just delete it. No, you cannot delete your own account, when its locked. You cannot delete your data (i.e. single tweets) or even just free the name for new people to get the account.
This is actually broken behaviour for a web service. And every developer should know how to handle such things properly.