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What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit

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

#141
post #46
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? Notifications. Multiple accounts. Filters. Speed. Twitter.com compares to (many) Twitter clients like 2004 webmail compares to native e-mail clients of the time.

Not just that: if you're using a Windows 8 tablet like the Surface (I appreciate I might be the only person doing so - it feels like that sometimes!) the Twitter web client is a terrible experience.

Because Twitter provides native clients for Android and iOS tablets their web site is simply not optimised for touch. It's crappy on Windows 8, plain and simple.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter was quite happy to sit and watch as people built fantastic services and tools on the service that without a doubt increased engagement, then sort of went "oh shit we need to make some money" and proceeded to piss on the bonfire 3rd party developers have created. It's even handed for Twitter and heavy handed for people that expect rationality from a company.

they're acting perfectly rationally: they see third party clients as a threat to their ability to monetise, so they're killing them why anyone would expect a business to do anything else is beyond my understanding!

When the popularity of your business has been built on the back of third party services and additions (hashtags? Retweets?) there's a certain level of expectation you're not going to turn around and stab them in the back.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter was quite happy to sit and watch as people built fantastic services and tools on the service that without a doubt increased engagement, then sort of went "oh shit we need to make some money" and proceeded to piss on the bonfire 3rd party developers have created. It's even handed for Twitter and heavy handed for people that expect rationality from a company.

So would you say the same thing about people that abuse regulations adopted honestly in the spirit of helping the public and now having been captured by special interests abuse it to serve their own interest? For example, most taxi cab regulations were passed in an era where the public had extremely unsafe and unclear transportation in an unfettered race to the bottom, (were being extorted by drivers, unsafe cars and…

Abusive, the regulations haven't adopted with the times, but it's apple to oranges in that situation.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe a person owns the data traces of their life, not twitter, not facebook, not any financial institution or ad network. Do you think by going to a physician and having a checkup that the hospital or doctor's network should now have the right to sell the fact that you have some skin condition to Johnson & Johnson so they can target you with advertising? I do not. I feel a physician and twitter have a legal resp…

Hospitals actually do sell their patient data to drug companies[1]. Not for advertising, but for medical research and drug trials. [1]: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/drugmakers-mine-data-fo...

Having worked in a hospital and undergone HIPAA training multiple times, I can assure you there are pretty strict rules about passing along identified data.

What the drug companies are purchasing is anonymized; they have the data about patient X, but they have n idea who that person is. They are literally purchasing only the chance to pass along a request through your doctors to see if you'd be interested in participating in a study if you meet some criteria.

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

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? Yes. Opening a web browser, typing twitter.com on a phone keyboard, waiting for it to load, logging in on a phone keyboard, then using a mobile site that is built to target as many users on mobile across different devices and versions is much less enjoyable than tapping the twitter icon on a phone and having…

Windows 8 does not run on phones.

His argument would apply to tablets, where Windows 8 does run, about equally well.

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe a person owns the data traces of their life, not twitter, not facebook, not any financial institution or ad network. Do you think by going to a physician and having a checkup that the hospital or doctor's network should now have the right to sell the fact that you have some skin condition to Johnson & Johnson so they can target you with advertising? I do not. I feel a physician and twitter have a legal resp…

> Do you think by going to a physician and having a checkup that the hospital or doctor's network should now have the right to sell the fact that you have some skin condition to Johnson & Johnson so they can target you with advertising?

With the healthcare situation in America right now, I could imagine a lot of people would gladly trade that for a 10% cost reduction....

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

The thing I don't get is: why build a Twitter client? Doing anything remotely useful with Twitter involves building something really substantial on top of the stream of tweets and users.

Hardly. I find Twitter's official clients' UIs atrocious, and happily paid for a third-party's implementation with roughly the same functionality (TweetBot, if you care). I don't find data mining of mostly-mundane content terribly interesting, with the exception of people posting photos of their debit cards (https://twitter.com/needadebitcard)

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

From what I can tell it doesn't affect current clients, only new ones.

It affects current clients; they just enforce the limits differently. You can get up to the greater of 2x your current userbase or 100,000 users at the time of the announcement. For applications with a massive install base that could still allow for significant growth, but they're still limited to not more than doubling in size.

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahem: http://www.w3.org/TR/notifications/ (although support isn't great yet: http://caniuse.com/#feat=notifications )

I have been using notifications in chrome since they were available, and they don't even come close to growl, AFAICT.

They're a bit better on OS X 10.8 with Notification Center, but still subpar overall. But that's the nature of taking a power user tool and dumbing it down for mass-market consumption.
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