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

Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 187 posts

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#151

Post by potatolicious »

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…

I don't think this move, in an of itself, will doom Twitter, but it is just another example of why Twitter and its model aren't working.

The problem with Twitter is the same problem that plagues innumerable startups - they've built a product without even once thinking about the business model, and are not scrambling for revenue.

Inexorably, everything they do in the pursuit of revenue is going to involve making the product worse for users. Ad injection, loss of 3rd-party apps that support the ecosystem, all of that is just example after example of how a business with no built-in monetization will eventually cannibalize itself in the pursuit of revenue.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#152

Post by potatolicious »

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…

I don't think this move, in an of itself, will doom Twitter, but it is just another example of why Twitter and its model aren't working.

The problem with Twitter is the same problem that plagues innumerable startups - they've built a product without even once thinking about the business model, and are not scrambling for revenue.

Inexorably, everything they do in the pursuit of revenue is going to involve making the product worse for users. Ad injection, loss of 3rd-party apps that support the ecosystem, all of that is just example after example of how a business with no built-in monetization will eventually cannibalize itself in the pursuit of revenue.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#153

Post by dasil003 »

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…

MySpace grew from music. Every single band was MySpace—all of them. This is what they leveraged to go from Friendster-level early adopter popularity, to mainstream youth popularity. This was huge, but they never got past this because MySpace always felt like an Internet underbelly sight. For the same reason that 50 years ago, grownups did not spend hours gabbing away on the telephone like teenagers, MySpace could never make inroads into the 25+ market segments.

Facebook rolled through phase 1 by being exclusive, then phase 2 by first saturating college students, then they exploded beyond what any social network had ever known by offering a clean, curated and controllable experience that steadily roped in older people by being the place to stay in touch with younger friends and family.

I always laugh when people trot out MySpace as a cautionary tale for Facebook, because it's irrelevant. MySpace was the 500lb gorilla in 2004, but Facebook is the only 5000lb gorilla that ever existed. Whatever bring them down won't be for the same reasons that MySpace failed.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#154

Post by dasil003 »

nl wrote: post #146
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…

> 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.

I don't think that's it. I don't remember the acquisition disrupting their strategy much. Rather I think the quality of their code base and inability to keep up with Facebook's agility is what drove the nails in the coffin.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#155

Post by dasil003 »

jcromartie wrote: post #144

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…

No one is arguing they aren't in their rights to do this. I mean sure a lot of people are indignant about the fact that Twitter became what it was through the ingenuity of the developer community, and without them Twitter would never have grown to its current size, but that's neither here nor there.

The bottom line is that Twitter's communications make it clear that they are grasping at straws for their profitability and that no developer is safe if they think you are capturing too much value. Obviously you always run a risk building on someone else's platform, but Twitter's direction and language around this would make any developer a fool to start anything new on that platform.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#156

Post by jgroome »

simonh wrote: post #118
bbuffone wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one thing that twitter and facebook have that no one else in the history of... well... anything i can think of. > They have an unlimited product placement budget. Every TV Show, News program, Commercial, Website, Company... places the "Go to facebook.com/ford" or "tweet us @nbcnews". This results in billions of dollars of advertising and they need to pay nothing. This helped build both twitter and facebook.…

>Google should figure out how to get this for Google Plus. Spoiler alert - the answer is 'be as popular as Twitter and Facebook'. T & F didn't become so popular because of product placement. They got the product placement because they were so popular.

> the answer is 'be as popular as Twitter and Facebook'

Also, proper URLs.

"Add your voice to the conversation! Just go to plus dot google dot com slash 114124849657167573853".

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#157

Post by streptomycin »

epo wrote: post #135
streptomycin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

app.net looks more attractive, until the same shit starts happening there in 5 years. The problem is walled garden social networks. It's a fundamentally bad idea for everyone involved, except the people who own it and can turn a profit. StatusNet/Identica is a much better solution to this problem than yet another walled garden. Free, open source, and federated. How many times does the same shit need to happen before…

Anyone who trots out the tired old cliche about walled gardens is just spouting rhetoric. Anyone who also advocates open source is can be ignored out of hand. The issues here are open standards, open protocols and the small matter of who pays for the upkeep of the infrastructure necessary to provide the service. Tired, Maoist-style sloganeering is merely making a noise.

I mentioned "federated" too, in case you missed it. You are right, that's the most important part. Yet another reason to support things like StatusNet over walled gardens like Twitter and app.net.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#158

Post by streptomycin »

oracuk wrote: post #89
streptomycin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

app.net looks more attractive, until the same shit starts happening there in 5 years. The problem is walled garden social networks. It's a fundamentally bad idea for everyone involved, except the people who own it and can turn a profit. StatusNet/Identica is a much better solution to this problem than yet another walled garden. Free, open source, and federated. How many times does the same shit need to happen before…

It would seem to me that open standards are the answer to walled gardens rather than 'Free, open source and federated'. I don't know of any standards-based activity discussing a twitter-like capability but multiple interoperable implementations, open and closed source, free and for money, provides an 'ecosystem'. I would contrast an ecosystem to a platform. A platform is owned or controlled centrally whereas a succes…

Well if the standard is open and popular, there will be free open source implementations, and they will be important. And if the standard is open but not federated, it's not very useful.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#159

Post by streptomycin »

brianwillis wrote: post #91
streptomycin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "the whole point". You're missing the part where it's yet another proprietary walled garden designed to maximize profits. That's not really a great model for end users.

The way you maximise profits is by making your customers happy. Twitter's customers are advertisers, not users. App.net's customers and users are the same group of people.

I know. All I'm saying is that's not the whole point. The walled garden is a fundamental aspect of both of those strategies, and in both cases the walled garden works against the best interests of the users.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#160

Post by misiti3780 »

dasil003 wrote: post #154
nl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't think that's it. I don't remember the acquisition disrupting their strategy much. Rather I think the quality of their code base and inability to keep up with Facebook's agility is what drove the nails in the coffin.

quality of their codebase?
Post reply on HN