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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.
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.
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.