Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 49 posts

Re: Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

#31

Post by demachina »

joebadmo wrote: post #29
demachina wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because Twitter and Facebook's search features are so great? Twitter doesn't even allow you to search your own tweet history past a certain point. 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. This is a matter of execution. I think BrowserID is making this a lot easier. Also, we have an exampl…

Not sure about Facebook since I never use it but Twitter's search feature is crippled because Twitter wants it that way. I think they are planning to monetize access to full history, though I dont remember exactly what was being said on this a week or two ago. When it comes to your posts and your stream I think you should be able to search it any way you want and cache it any where you want.

I cite Wikipedia only for the foundation model, funded by contributions, to free us from corporate control, being bombed with ads, and having our personal information harvested for profit.

With a message bus foundation you wouldn't have most of the politics associated with group editing of articles which is where Wikipedia has its worst problems. The only places there would be a risk of politics at the Message Bus Foundation is in terms of use, abuse mitigation, spam filtering, censorship issues and interacting with intrusive government requests. When it comes to privacy and freedom of speech it should be designed to be as private and free as possible.

Re: Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

#32

Post by chris_wot »

demachina wrote: post #24
joebadmo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another reason things systems like Twitter and Facebook shouldn't be silos with centralized control, but distributed, decentralized, self-hosted systems built on open standards.

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…

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.

Not really - I could see that if you decentralize then you can setup something like a peering scheme between social networks. And if a person wants to find another person on another social network, then perhaps a peering relationship should be setup with that other network, or perhaps that person can migrate to the other network.

It could be practical, but the infrastructure at the moment isn't really there.

Re: Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

#33

Post by demachina »

chris_wot wrote: post #32
demachina wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Not really - I could see that if you decentralize then you can setup something like a peering scheme between social networks. And if a person wants to find another person on another social network, then perhaps a peering relationship should be setup with that other network, or perh…

If someone is following thousands of people in their stream, and they are scattered across a hundred servers, how do you go about assembling their stream for them in real-time. Is the host server going to have to send user id's for everyone every user based on that server is following, to every server where the people being followed are based, and have every one of those server send all the messages of interest so the host server can build streams for all its users?

Twitter didn't stop sucking reliability wise until they switched to a single persistent user stream connection and abandoned REST most of the time. You really want to have that one persistent connection for a user's stream.

Re: Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

#34

Post by ebiester »

zemaj wrote: post #22

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…

Wait.. What other uses are there for a Twitter API? What I don't understand is why Twitter can't just insert their ads I to these API requests and be done with it.

Re: Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

#35

Post by chris_wot »

demachina wrote: post #33
chris_wot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Not really - I could see that if you decentralize then you can setup something like a peering scheme between social networks. And if a person wants to find another person on another social network, then perhaps a peering relationship should be setup with that other network, or perh…

If someone is following thousands of people in their stream, and they are scattered across a hundred servers, how do you go about assembling their stream for them in real-time. Is the host server going to have to send user id's for everyone every user based on that server is following, to every server where the people being followed are based, and have every one of those server send all the messages of interest so th…

That's a reasonable objection. However, could you get an aggregating server that collects the updates between networks? You might need to batch it, but for networks with better network connectivity it could be done in real time, or close to it.

There is no real need for instantaneous updates, unless the networks so deem it necessary.

Re: Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

#36

Post by BadLogInMyAss »

Oh no, I'm "submitting too fast."

FUCK YOU, "Hacker News." You have a pathetic, incompetent Web site that can't handle the basic functionality we would've expected 10 years ago. Then you insult people who contribute FREE content to your pompous, horseshit site with this bullshit?

Pull your head out of your ass and learn who puts the fucking food on your table, jagoffs.

Re: Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

#38

Post by antninja »

Squanto wrote: post #11
simonsarris wrote: post #2

Maybe there's a trend here, but maybe its just me being short-sighted. I'll type out what I'm thinking. I think that the uncomfortable future for a lot of the e-properties that people enjoy happens to hinge on the fact that the way they are the most useful clashes with the ways they can make money. Big time. Facebook will sponsor stories, alienating users a little for eyeball time. Twitter will make sure promoted thi…

This makes a lot of sense. Facebook + Twitter alienate their users by watering down the experience with ads, losing the 'cool'ness they need to keep eyeballs on them. I think that's where Google+ can swoop in and make Twitter+Facebook look like Myspace. Thoughts?

The Google+ API is not designed to empower third-party developers. Maybe they're still searching for a way to do it right, but currently it's too limited for an ecosystem to flourish. Why should a challenger come from a big company anyway? Both Facebook and Twitter were small startups during the fall of Myspace.

Re: Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

#39

Post by biggfoot »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #15
biggfoot wrote: post #9

The little voice in my head just got a whole lot louder - "don't friggin build a business on someone else's business. Do your own shit!"

It is ok to build on somebody else's business IFF you have a contract in place protecting you. The problem is, today, there are few contracts signed because that would prevent tomorrow's pivot (that screws all of today's partners).

"Tomorrow's pivot" :) I think you summed up all of it with that phrase.

Re: Did Twitter Just Deliver Third Party Apps A Death Blow?

#40

Post by Tichy »

ebiester wrote: post #34
zemaj wrote: post #22

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…

Wait.. What other uses are there for a Twitter API? What I don't understand is why Twitter can't just insert their ads I to these API requests and be done with it.

There are I think over 100000 Twitter apps (don't remember the exact number, but it was a lot). I think those are not all Twitter clients.
Post reply on HN