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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

#101

Post by halter73 »

wccrawford wrote: post #53
artursapek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose, and I suppose if the client used a user's IP they couldn't block them the same way. But wouldn't a client that scrapes the full HTML to get the data you want be horribly inefficient, and hard to maintain? API's are all the rage because they give you just what you want. Think about bandwidth.

Having written scrapers in the past, I can tell you that changes are usually pretty easy to deal with. And if you write your scraper nicely, many small changes won't even matter. Since the client runs on the user's machine, performance isn't really an issue, either. (Trying to do it for all users on a server is a different story.) APIs are indeed "all the rage" because they're easier and don't change as much. But whe…

I think the obvious solution is to have the client first check for updated scraping rules from a server operated by the client's creator. The client could check for these scraping rule updates every time the client starts up or on some interval (or maybe after certain errors even) and only pull down the whole thing when the cache is invalidated. Then, as you suggest, the client could do the actual scraping which would make it harder for twitter to block.

Not as straightforward as an API to be sure, but not impossible by a long shot.

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

#102

Post by jbenz »

nollidge wrote: post #81

Sort of amused by the wording in this line: > It does not appear that your service addresses an area that our current or future products do not already serve. How can your future product already serve an area?

Shouldn't the real news today be that Twitter has invented time travel?

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

#103

Post by pdenya »

jmilloy wrote: post #85

Twitter: Don't build core-feature Twitter clients, we probably won't approve them. Atta: I built a core-feature Twitter client! Twitter: Sorry, we're not approving your core-feature Twitter client. Who is surprised? How is this news? Were you expecting them to not apply their own rules? It seems like a clear-cut case, and concluding "don't build anything for Twitter" is just throwing a temper tantrum.

I don't know if anyone is surprised by the response as much as disappointed. I've seen the news that twitter is limiting api clients but I haven't seen news of them denying someone who reached that limit more keys. I clicked this wondering what was going to happen with Tweetbot for mac when it hits the same limit and now I know.

Maybe the "Don't build anything for Twitter" thing is a little heavy handed but the fact remains that if you build something that you hoping will get more than 100k users you can't count on twitter as a stable platform.

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

#104

Post by koide »

tinco wrote: post #93
koide wrote: post #69

I wonder why something like "If you want more than 100k usernames, either pay us $x per username or use our advertisement API and put whatever tweets/ads we push where we tell you to" is not an option. It would be refreshingly honest and for some people/clients it could work, plus it could earn them some of the needed cash.

This doesn't work for them because Twitter has had 1.16 billion dollars in funding. Getting money from teeny little twitter apps is not the sort of plan they are going to make that money back with. Imagine if they charged a buck per username per year. This would probably be enough money to put tweetro out of business (say 100k dollar per year), but it would not come close to the amount of money they need to make. Eve…

True, you'd be left with "do the app like we tell you to" option, like offering an API where's mandatory to show the sponsored content in specific, Twitter approved ways.

It would probably be a nightmare to implement well.

A pity.

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

#105

Post by jcurbo »

jusben1369 wrote: post #62

I've watched this from a distance with interest. Developers have a special place within the overall Internet ecosystem. As a non developer, everything Twitter has said and done in the last 12 months or more tells me "We don't need a healthy 3rd party ecosystem and we don't want one. Hobbysits can stay filling odd niche requirements and here's our cap. Everyone else though? Sorry" I have no emotion around this as I'm…

In his defense, I don't think Marco just connected the dots, he's been talking about this since Twitter first put out their updated developer guidelines.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

qq66 wrote: post #97
[deleted] wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Well, I am a strong believer in Native > Web. That's why we started the company -- so only alerting other people to the fact that we're doing something in the same arena. I didn't make the comment to sell to you -- there is a common cause behind why I made the comment and why I started the company.

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by mcantelon »

jmilloy wrote: post #85

Twitter: Don't build core-feature Twitter clients, we probably won't approve them. Atta: I built a core-feature Twitter client! Twitter: Sorry, we're not approving your core-feature Twitter client. Who is surprised? How is this news? Were you expecting them to not apply their own rules? It seems like a clear-cut case, and concluding "don't build anything for Twitter" is just throwing a temper tantrum.

>concluding "don't build anything for Twitter" is just throwing a temper tantrum.

Not really. They led people on, over the years, into building on their API. People spent a lot of time and money building Twitter clients. Then they pulled the rug out. Why would you build anything using an API that could get arbitrarily locked down in the future?

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

#108

Post by Argorak »

pdenya wrote: post #103
jmilloy wrote: post #85

Twitter: Don't build core-feature Twitter clients, we probably won't approve them. Atta: I built a core-feature Twitter client! Twitter: Sorry, we're not approving your core-feature Twitter client. Who is surprised? How is this news? Were you expecting them to not apply their own rules? It seems like a clear-cut case, and concluding "don't build anything for Twitter" is just throwing a temper tantrum.

I don't know if anyone is surprised by the response as much as disappointed. I've seen the news that twitter is limiting api clients but I haven't seen news of them denying someone who reached that limit more keys. I clicked this wondering what was going to happen with Tweetbot for mac when it hits the same limit and now I know. Maybe the "Don't build anything for Twitter" thing is a little heavy handed but the fact…

Its not heavy-handed. Twitter has shown repeatedly that they have no problem with:

a) changing the rules of the game and b) leaving you in the dark of what the actual rules _are_

Make business with people that care about your business. Twitter clearly doesn't.

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

#109

Post by mcantelon »

barrkel wrote: post #24
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.

And it lacks functionality. I used to use Brizzly and when that shut down my Twitter use went way down.

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

#110

Post by taylorbuley »

jmilloy wrote: post #85

Twitter: Don't build core-feature Twitter clients, we probably won't approve them. Atta: I built a core-feature Twitter client! Twitter: Sorry, we're not approving your core-feature Twitter client. Who is surprised? How is this news? Were you expecting them to not apply their own rules? It seems like a clear-cut case, and concluding "don't build anything for Twitter" is just throwing a temper tantrum.

It's interesting to me that a prevailing view seems to suggest that developers have a right to plumb a given service for data.

This worldview seems to come up most in relation to free services, so maybe it's a belief that freely consumable services via the Web or mobile give should mean a freedom to consume the same data via an API.

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