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New APIs to power customer engagement in Direct Messages

blog.twitter.com

41–50 of 75 posts

Re: New APIs to power customer engagement in Direct Messages

#41
post #23

A big history lesson and a big WARNING for anyone who is thinking of building anything with Twitter's APIs. Once this company, long ago, encouraged developers to use their APIs to build products and utilities. Developers heeded the call and flocked to the company's APIs. They built new clients and innovative solutions to make Twitter truly useful. Twitter grew fast with the developer's help and the developer's themse…

I agree with your sentiment, but it applies to a lot of popular companies, especially debt financed companies that don't charge their users. When they stick their hand in the VC cookie jar, the necrotic hand on the other side, grabs them and pulls them in.

Re: New APIs to power customer engagement in Direct Messages

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still cannot release a twitter client that doesn't get maxed at 100,000 users. Why bother implementing ideas when it will probably meet with the same problem due to our success.

Well, the platform is not just about client apps, people use Twitter's data and features for all kinds of things. You're welcome to build on the platform if you've got a good idea.

Well, my good idea was a client app, so no, I'm (and I suspect a good group of other) not welcome anymore.

Frankly, it should be a lot more about client apps and new ways to use the information in a personal manner instead of creating an API that looks for all the world like something I can use to automate my support staff on twitter and fire a bunch of people.

Re: New APIs to power customer engagement in Direct Messages

#44

Who really trusts Twitter at this point for anything developer related? Not just talking about their API. Twitter never knew what they were doing, and that used to be fine, but the difference now is people finally figured out that Twitter doesn't know what they're doing. They keep releasing all these new features that are all over the place (AND worse than before). They should really stop, step back, and think about…

Thanks for the feedback. Can you be specific about the API features that you're referring to that are "all over the place"? I'm personally really excited about this, and this is probably the most cohesive a strategy I've seen for the API platform. We're very focused on fundamentals right now.

No i think you guys on the API team did a great job really.

I was just criticizing about the company itself. It's great that you the API team is doing your best to tackle this trust issue but I think this needs to be dealt with on a company level. Otherwise it's just you guys working really hard to see it not pay off.

Re: New APIs to power customer engagement in Direct Messages

#45
post #23

A big history lesson and a big WARNING for anyone who is thinking of building anything with Twitter's APIs. Once this company, long ago, encouraged developers to use their APIs to build products and utilities. Developers heeded the call and flocked to the company's APIs. They built new clients and innovative solutions to make Twitter truly useful. Twitter grew fast with the developer's help and the developer's themse…

Twitter also did something that I find particularly interesting: they somehow convinced developers that you needed them to bless your app and provide APIs to build a client that accesses their service, even though those credentials must be distributed to the public with your client. To people like me who are old enough to have dealt with AOL, the idea that developers are willing to buy into this fiction is absolutely insane: if the official Twitter client can do it, then so can your client, and there is nothing Twitter can do to stop you that doesn't also break their client (which they are generally less willing to do than change their API on short notice!).

As far as I can tell the only thing that enforces this is what should amount to an antitrust level of collusion between the mega-companies to restrict access to products (via services such as the Apple App Store) that do things that the other mega-companies dislike, as it is in all of their best interests to maintain this same fiction. The reality is that client-side API keys are totally meaningless and make no sense: in an attempt to believe they make sense some developers then start to believe other crazy things like "if I compile a token into my program other people can't read it as it is compiled" or to insist "there must be some way to encrypt my binary to make sure that other people can't get my API key", but this kind of broken thought only happens due to a broken premise :/.

(That said, it isn't 100% clear to me that if someone released a true Twitter client Apple would remove it, so if someone disagrees with that premise I am all ears: that is simply the only theoretical mechanism I can see that would seem to enforce this, and I feel like I have heard of this happening before, but AFAIK the random apps in the App Store for abusing Tindr are all based on reverse engineering the true API for the service, but it is also possible that Apple cares less about helping Tindr or that Tindr has a different internal mentality and culture surrounding this kind of thing; or it could even be the case that these now have been removed and I haven't noticed yet as I don't really pay much attention to track them, or even that I am wrong and they are somehow more indirect in their implementation.)

Re: New APIs to power customer engagement in Direct Messages

#46
post #23

A big history lesson and a big WARNING for anyone who is thinking of building anything with Twitter's APIs. Once this company, long ago, encouraged developers to use their APIs to build products and utilities. Developers heeded the call and flocked to the company's APIs. They built new clients and innovative solutions to make Twitter truly useful. Twitter grew fast with the developer's help and the developer's themse…

@replies and hashtags (one of the most successful features of twitter) came from third party apps,

Re: New APIs to power customer engagement in Direct Messages

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he meant adding arbitrary token count limits out of the blue that forced countless 3rd party apps to close shop once they became successful? Or the fact that new features like polls are absent in the public APIs, years after they have been introduced? I'm sure you're very excited about these new APIs for #brand #engagement, but don't pretend that Twitter has been a great steward of its public API over the last…

I'm not pretending - I've been responsible for the public-facing APIs (since 2014). We've launched mute, accessibility text for images, multi image and video upload, etc etc. We haven't added every single feature, but we've done what we have done in a very methodical and careful way that ensures platform stability. Polls are a complicated issue because they depend on cards, which are also not currently part of the AP…

In retrospect, my words were probably a bit harsh, sorry about that Andy. It's never a nice feeling having one's hard work shittalked by strangers on the Internet.

A roadmap is definitely highly appreciated. Something I'd love to hear from Twitter is a definitive statement on 3rd party clients: are they a welcome and supported part of the Twitter platform, or is their existence a historical accident that have no role in the strategy going forward?

(I'm aware that such a statement is probably not in Twitter's interest to make, but one can have dreams, right?)

Re: New APIs to power customer engagement in Direct Messages

#49
post #45
post #23

A big history lesson and a big WARNING for anyone who is thinking of building anything with Twitter's APIs. Once this company, long ago, encouraged developers to use their APIs to build products and utilities. Developers heeded the call and flocked to the company's APIs. They built new clients and innovative solutions to make Twitter truly useful. Twitter grew fast with the developer's help and the developer's themse…

Twitter also did something that I find particularly interesting: they somehow convinced developers that you needed them to bless your app and provide APIs to build a client that accesses their service, even though those credentials must be distributed to the public with your client . To people like me who are old enough to have dealt with AOL, the idea that developers are willing to buy into this fiction is absolutel…

Once I considered writing a Twitter client and the only reasonable option was to implement a proxy that would hold the API key... Hopefully I ended up not wasting time building this!
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