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What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

marco.org

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Re: What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

#21

Post by quotemstr »

artursapek wrote: post #16
quotemstr wrote: post #8

You know, back before APIs were all the rage, people wrote clients for web services by scraping. Twitter really wouldn't be able to do anything about a Twitter client that pretended to be IE9.

I've had a bot blocked by Myspace when I resorted to that. They started redirecting all my requests to " http://google.com ". And I was just working on an old Thinkpad running Ubuntu server in my dorm room, so I have to think blocking me was an automated response. I'm sure Twitter knows how to block crawlers, especially ones that they're actually aware of.

I'm sure Twitter would block bots doing unuserlike things. But isn't the point of a Twitter client to do userlike things?

Re: What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

#22

Post by ghshephard »

hnriot wrote: post #9
Pewpewarrows wrote: post #2

If my salary depended on the Twitter API right now I'd be scared shitless.

Unless you work for Twitter, I'd say you're right, and rightly so. Don't depend on someone else's API, how many times must history repeat itself before this message sinks in.

That's an unreasonable position to take. Almost all third-party software products ever created rely on some other third-party APIs, and to suggest "Don't depend on someone else's API" as a strategy would be akin to saying "Don't write software for a living."

The challenge is to determine, in advance, if the platform you are writing for will maintain some reasonable level of access to the API, both now, and in the future.

Re: What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

#23

Post by quotemstr »

eli wrote: post #19
quotemstr wrote: post #8

You know, back before APIs were all the rage, people wrote clients for web services by scraping. Twitter really wouldn't be able to do anything about a Twitter client that pretended to be IE9.

To what end? You're going to base a business on scraping twitter.com? That sounds like a much worse idea than trying to work within the API.

> You're going to base a business on scraping twitter.com?

A business? Probably too high risk. A nice FOSS client, though? Why not?

Re: What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

#24

Post by barrkel »

hnriot wrote: post #7

*The effective rule, therefore, is even simpler: “Don’t build anything for Twitter.” Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have. What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do. I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's pe…

Twitter.com is slow. I pretty much stopped using twitter altogether instead.

Re: What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

#25

Post by swombat »

hnriot wrote: post #7

*The effective rule, therefore, is even simpler: “Don’t build anything for Twitter.” Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have. What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do. I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's pe…

> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.

Emphasis on "supposed". It doesn't always do it, and definitely never to everyone's taste. Hence the custom clients.

> I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's perfectly reasonable of them to not make any special exemption. If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter then they'd likely give you a higher limit, but that's not the case...

By now I doubt anyone is truly surprised, but it's disappointing nevertheless. Twitter's success is partly built on the explosion of Twitter clients that allowed Twitter to evolve faster than its dev team could follow (hence all the scaling issues). Then they bought a few players in the Twitter client market. And now they've strangled all the ones that remained in that market.

So basically, Twitter now has an obvious and provable history of leaving things open, deciding that thriving third-party market X is nice, stepping into it themselves, and killing everyone else there.

That's not a reputation I'd like to have for my business, when it is a piece of underlying infrastructure that depends on others to make it thrive.

Anyone starting a business from today onwards and having any critical dependency or reliance on Twitter is insane.

Re: What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

#27

Post by SoftwareMaven »

Not exactly. Twitter doesn't want you to build anything that will take a single eyeball from them. There are still services that can be built that don't fall in that category, though, such as sentiment analysis.

At least, for now. Twitter has shown they are willing to be hostile towards their developers. Even if I fit in the "don't take their eyeballs" category, I wouldn't build on their platform because I don't trust them.

Re: What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

#28

Post by masklinn »

hnriot wrote: post #7

*The effective rule, therefore, is even simpler: “Don’t build anything for Twitter.” Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have. What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do. I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's pe…

> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8

That it's a terrible experience on many fronts, that it's slow as molasses (especially on mobile networks), that composition sucks, that multiuser blows, that it's got no idea where you left off and doesn't care, etc...?

> This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.

Crappy?

Re: What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

#29

Post by Skroob »

hnriot wrote: post #9
Pewpewarrows wrote: post #2

If my salary depended on the Twitter API right now I'd be scared shitless.

Unless you work for Twitter, I'd say you're right, and rightly so. Don't depend on someone else's API, how many times must history repeat itself before this message sinks in.

Better advice would be: Don't depend on someone else's API when they've made it quite clear how hostile they're going to be towards you.

Re: What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

#30

Post by potatolicious »

hnriot wrote: post #7

*The effective rule, therefore, is even simpler: “Don’t build anything for Twitter.” Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have. What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do. I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's pe…

> "If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter"

That's exactly what happened here. Twitter does not currently have a native Win8 client, and a native client has always been a value-add for Twitter's users - many people prefer to have an always-on Twitter widget on their machine that pushes messages to them, over a browser window they have to poll.

I haven't used this software myself, but it certainly seems like something that is welcomed by Windows users and improves the experience for the relevant set of Twitter users.

The root problem here is unsurprising: for many web startups what's good for users is not good for the company. The modern, ad-driven web company is a precarious balance between tending to the sheep and throwing them at the wolves as hard as you can.

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