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Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

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Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#141

Post by peteri »

streptomycin wrote: post #66
Firehed wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many successful open-source platforms are there? I can't think of any. Unlike Free software, platforms have a maintenance cost (servers), and that cost cannot be paid by donated man-hours. The only thing close that I can think of is BitTorrent due to the distrubuted infrastructure, but that's quite impractical to duplicate in this context (how can browsing the content contribute back to hosting and storage automa…

There are many. Email is a particularly notable example. Luckily, the technology sector wasn't run by "entrepreneurs" back when email was invented, or we would have wound up with walled gardens there too (Hotmail users can only email other Hotmail users and contacts can't be exported, etc).

We did have walled gardens. I had accounts on Compuserve, bix, cix, MCIMail with a college account that did mail with bang path addressing over uucp (this is in 1986/7).

Most of the UKs email over uucp came in via the ukc gateway and IIRC I think I was charged something like 4p/1K for email that was international at that point. From memory my usenet feed came via a US bank in the City and was over a telebit trailblazer modem.

By 1990 I'm pretty sure that cix,MCIMail and Compuserve all at least had gateways to SMTP mail and within a few years it all became more more transparent and free.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#142

Post by smackfu »

chris_wot wrote: post #110
rcknight wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mac client has not been updated since June 2011 ... hardly well supported!

Not really a valid reason. What is it about the client that needs to be updated?

Amusingly, it doesn't even use Twitter's own picture service for photos attachments which is a year old at this point. It still uses yfrog.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#143

Post by jcromartie »

rcknight wrote: post #101
k-mcgrady wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's own clients are fine. You can read tweets and send tweets. That's the basis of the service. It's supposed to be simple. Why don't you like it?

The mac client has not been updated since June 2011 ... hardly well supported!

I never would have noticed, since it continues to work without any issues for me.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#144

Post by jcromartie »

Are people missing the fact that existing Twitter clients can keep their token allocation and double it? And new ones are limited to 100K only by default (they can ask for more)?

Since when did people consider unlimited access to Twitter's API an unalienable right? It is their platform, and their API. It's also completely free.

Twitter is absolutely free to limit usage of their own API however they wish. If it means they want to change the rate limiting on their servers, I see no problem with that.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#145

Post by BerislavLopac »

huskyr wrote: post #133
BerislavLopac wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is ultimately infrastructure I think this is the most important point, one that most people -- Twitter included -- seem to overlook or ignore. What we need is an open Twitter-like protocol -- but for it to be successful it should be peer-to-peer, not server-based like Twitter. A few year ago I was working on a startup which would build precisely such a protocol, but my partners backed out before we could lift…

Well, there's OStatus ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus ), which is supposed to be an open standard for microblogging.

No, it's not quite what I had in mind. OStatus is intended for exchange of updates between sites that have statuses (statii?), while I'm thinking of something that would exchange messages between users directly without the need for a central server (except probably for user discovery and connection).

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#146

Post by nl »

cletus wrote: post #36

This doesn't surprise me at all. When you develop on someone else's platform, you have to walk a fine line between not being successful at all and being too successful such that the platform provider co-opts your business (maybe you get lucky and get bought out). This is nothing new. Such moves as this were (IMHO) inevitable. They'll slowly chip away at anything they see as taking revenue from them. The part I disagr…

Twitter is ultimately infrastructure

Bullshit.

To reinforcer this point: in the early days of Twitter it kept falling over under the load - the one thing infrastructure should never do. It didn't matter.

To further reinforcer this point: OSStatus/Identi.ca has a widely deployed, API compatible implementation of Twitter. That really is infrastructure, and yet it has had approximately zero impact on Twitter's growth or strategy - because Twitter isn't infrastructure.

(Unless you mean it in the way that every single online service is ultimately infrastructure - but I don't think this is what you meant).

Twitter has eyeballs too

You say that like it is a minor point, whereas actually it is 90% of what matters.

It also has the publishers people want to follow, for whatever your particular niche is.

social platforms seem fickle at best

Actually, social platforms aren't fickle: they are usually incredibly sticky (see the huge number of forums that have been running for 10+ years). Most people just look at the "social network" category and see how Friendster/MySpace/Bebo/Hi5/etc all got destroyed by the Facebook juggernaut.

They never talk about the success of LinkedIn/PInterest/Twitter/Reddit/etc.

In every case, those overran competitors of their own (including Facebook in some cases) to dominate their categories.

That's not "fickle", that is platform strategy and product development.

There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.

MySpace sold to News Ltd, and then went downhill. Maybe Twitter won't sell itself to a company that is actively internet-hostile. But yes, you are correct: potentially any company could fail.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#148

Post by rhp »

yen223 wrote: post #93
btipling wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook makes a lot of money from their devs.

Not nearly enough, by all accounts.

Zynga accounted for 15% of Facebook's revenue in Q1. Although Zynga's contribution declined compared to last year, payments and fees revenue (mostly from apps) doubled over last year to $186 million. That's not an insignificant amount.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/23/zynga-made-up-15-of-faceboo...

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#149

Post by seunosewa »

6ren wrote: post #123
leak wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but MySpace had the same exact thing for companies..."Check out our MySpace" was everywhere.

Why did MySpace fail? Users are known to be sticky - they tend to stay with the same newspaper, brand of chocolate, chewing gum, household cleaning products and so on. But they are only sticky up to a point. If something is better by a sufficiently significant margin, then they will switch (or some will). You can keep those customers just by just matching your competitor's improvements. For many things, the pace of c…

People joined Facebook because they could connect to all their old schoolmates on Facebook. And this was because they started out as a school network. Myspace would have failed even if they kept improving it, if that one feature was missing.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#150

Post by hollerith »

kapowaz wrote: post #106
nikcub wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. This couldn't be further from the truth, and the thousands of copycat networks, not least from Google, are proof that networks can't be commoditized. The only reason I am still on GitHub, Facebook, hn, reddit and Twitter - despite there being better 'products' and 'infrastructure'- is because everybody else is, and the same app…

The two are not mutually exclusive. It is infrastructure, but it's also subject to network effects.

Your comment is correct, but misses the point: grandparent was contesting "infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization", not "Twitter is ultimately infrastructure".
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