Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

Short answer - no.

There's a lot of people over-reacting to this situation. If you read Twitter's blog post its clear that they're following up on enforcing the API "Rules of the Road" they've had for over a year. https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-twitter-e...

Section !.5. clearly lays out the rules clients must follow "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. If so, certain additional terms apply, including:"

These rules are actually pretty generous and plainly lay out their expectations for third party applications. It's unclear what led to Tweets being removed from LinkedIn, my guess would be that Twitter attempted to enforce their branding rules, LinkedIn declined and instead said they would remove the Tweets from being displayed entirely. It doesn't sound like Twitter just cut off access to LinkedIn or came up with new restrictions they haven't already been publishing (and compelling 3rd parties to comply with) for a long time.

Any business must deal with existential threats, be it from competitors, regulation or bad investments. Building a business on top of an API is just another potential risk, you need to decide if they company in question is a safe enough bet to play on, just like you have to decide the same thing for all other risks.

I really can't see decentralized social networks being successful. If all hosts are going to be synced the traffic would be huge. If they aren't synced search for both messages and users would be painful. Patching together a stream when the people you follow are scattered across a hundred different servers painful. Account creation for average tech illiterate users painful. If they have to rely on some third party to provide a host, how is that any better than relying on Twitter or Facebook, as soon as the hoster decides it isn't worth the expense or to boot you for some random reason what happens?

Wouldn't it be better to build a centralized message bus and identity system under some kind of foundation like Wikipedia. You would have to get benefactors to fund it is the big problem. Twitter has proved itself to be a priceless service for communication and news streams, its like the real-time Wikipedia.

Its just major regrettable the people who are running it are completely trashing it in the predictable pursuit of the beloved buck and a fat IPO.

I'd love nothing more than foundation based centralized message bus and identity service offering API services to any and all responsible developers and apps, short text only messages and links to avoid all the issues with attachments little or no censorship, private communications between users encrypted so even the foundation can't read them or offer them up to prying governments, some mechanism to control and kill spam.

The takeaway lesson for me is that user-generated content is incompatible with advertising.

Now, as a caveat, I'm the sort of person who thinks that modern advertising is 99% toxic sludge in the mental environment: I am firmly in the Kalle Lasn camp. However, here's how I see it working: users come to the site because of the UGC, but advertising, by nature, has to grab attention at some level. You can't design for both "make the UGC, stuff users actually care about, primary" and "make sure that you get ad clickthroughs." Since the latter pays the bills, it tends to win - and users tend to leave because on one level or another, it's obvious that the site isn't about them (and if your site depends on UGC, your users ain't wrong to think that the site should be about them!)

The secondary takeaway is that advertising is not a long-term sustainable business model.

Advertising has a strong tendency to push startups into this insular turtles-all-the-way-down bullshit: social media with ads for analytics, analytics for ad-based startups, startups about how to reach demographics, and so on. They're as familiar an archetype around here as Punch & Judy. But it's all the tertiary economy, it's all flash: the fundamentals of advertising as a business model only get weaker over time. The effectiveness of advertising at all, in any context is debateable, and participating it is participating in an endless arms race. I argue that this should tell us that advertising is not the way to go if you want to build a lasting company: you need to take money in exchange for goods and services (real goods and services: advertising doesn't count, as I'm in the process of arguing).

That's hard! That's really difficult. PayPal, Square, and WePay should show us how ridiculously, gratuitously difficult the "take money for" part is, and taking people's money once you've convinced them that you've got something worth their money, is the easy part! Before you even get there, you have to build something good, and none of us should have any illusions that that's easy. Then between those two parts, there's "persuade users that your cool thing actually is cool and worth paying money for," and sweet leaping Buddhas that's a lifetime of work in itself (the lifetime of work, in fact, that advertising is doing in such a toxic and commons-destroying way right now).

But: you are a hacker. You are a hustler. You are an engineer.

Solving hard problems is your job.

Advertising is not a business model: advertising is a problem to be solved. Advertising is a bullshit legacy of past business models, here to be disrupted. The reason that I hang out on Hacker News is that I believe that its hackers, hustlers, and engineers are the people who can look at the way we do something now, think "that suck! I can do better than that!" and then do the difficult, frustrating, painful work to actually make something better, show people why it's better, and accept the monetary rewards that come from having made something better and proved it.

We can do this.

Always

I think you either missed or are glossing over Michael Sippey's blog post today where he said "in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used". People aren't upset about the old "stricter guidelines" you are quoting, they are upset about the new ones.

It was poor judgement and poor PR to lob that out there before they were ready to actually spell out what these new "stricter guidelines" are. It creates fear, uncertainty and doubt among Twitter API developers and they are getting sick of fear, uncertainty and doubt, its been going on for a long time now.

Twitter's message bus, API and identity system have become valuable Internet resources. But Twitter has never been particularly great at thinking of innovative uses for it or developing great clients. There are a lot of really interesting and different ways to use those, regrettably they are trying to kill most of them and inflict a homogonized, boring, monoculture on their user base they can monotize, which will make the experience progressively worse.

At this point I imagine most API developers are wishing there was a new message bus they could move to but its a daunting challenge to field one, even more daunting to get a critical mass of messages moved over to it to make it interesting, and really daunting to fund it without resorting to all the lameness Twitter is now knee deep in.