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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

#151

Post by mcantelon »

jcromartie wrote: post #134
mcantelon wrote: post #107

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.

Twitter's official web client has no filtering capability, for one thing. For that reason alone I can't use it regularly.

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

#152

Post by NoPiece »

shawn-butler wrote: post #125
nicholassmith wrote: post #114

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…

You should take a look at the history of regulation of taxi's in New York. It had less to do with safety or clarity than protecting exiting cabbies and from competition during the depression.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/media/totweb/taxioftomorrow_history_...

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

#153

Post by dkersten »

Firehed wrote: post #147
jcromartie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

WTF? Why do people post photos of their debit cards online?!?

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

#154

Post by ja2ke »

nicholassmith wrote: post #142
blibble wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The word "tweet" to refer to a post. A bird as the logo! Twitter started as barely more than a faceless service, and most of what is "Twitter" as a brand came from its users and developers.

Not that there isn't precedent for their model. I remember being fascinated to read that the Big Mac and Ronald McDonald both came from local franchise restaurants, not corporate HQ. It's just a frustrating position to take. It feels short sighted.

A really cool fried who suddenly shows up for lunch in a suit, then eventually stops calling you. Your mom reads about them in a magazine and excitedly tells you what they're up to for a few years, then you stop hearing about them.

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

#155

Post by cbr »

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?

If it's in development and not released yet.

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

#156

Post by chipotle_coyote »

javajosh wrote: post #129

Goddamn, I've never seen a clearer example of the colloquial term "butt hurt". Twitter is a company, they built something, they support it, they have the right to control it, and they have arbitrary rights over it. More tellingly, they have a very good point. It reminds me of the craigslist haters, and my response to them. I don't hate craigslist for stopping third parties from using their data because, frankly, it h…

A company builds an API and encourages lots of developers to use it across a wide variety of projects, and they do. After achieving almost unprecedented success in user adoption, the company decides to unilaterally change their terms to say, "From this day on, not only do we want you to use our API only in ways that drive value to us, we're not really down with you getting any value in return beyond whatever value being able to say 'you can post to Twitter from our app!' brings you." And they are really down with screwing over existing developers to bring them in line with the New Reality.

I'm pretty sure that I would, at that point, not be keen on developing anything that used that API, even if it complied with the new rules, because the company has at that point demonstrated that they will knife me in the back if they think it's going to further their own business goals. How is that reaction ridiculous and immature on my part?

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

#157

Post by ishansharma »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #10
ishansharma wrote: post #3

This is really idiotic. What are they trying to do? Make sure that all the top users flock to App.net or somewhere else?

Considering that I don't know a single real-life person that is on app.net, I wouldn't consider it an alternative to anything.

I know quite a bit of people and common thing between all of them is that they are quite influential. They have been irritated by things like this.

And they may convince others to join App.net. Granted that many people will avoid App.net just because you have to pay for it and common internet guy will never realize what Twitter is doing. Still, if even top 10-20% of people who I follow go to App.net, I will follow!

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

#158

Post by pavel_lishin »

shawn-butler wrote: post #131
taylorbuley wrote: post #110

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…

> I believe a person owns the data traces of their life, not twitter, not facebook, not any financial institution or ad network.

And any given person may write their own client, and use one single token for their twitter account.

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

#159

Post by zmmmmm »

uptown wrote: post #38

Aside from pissing off Twitter, and possibly getting a cease and desist, what's preventing developers from building a translator that sits between Twitter's web layer and their native application client? Couldn't something be developed that loads Twitter into a hidden webview that's locally scraped for the purpose of re-display however the developer pleases on their client? This implementation wouldn't require the to…

> But I suppose they'd just wind up getting sued

You answered your own question. People seem to be under the impression that just because something is accessible with a web browser it no longer falls under copyright and you can use it how you want. This has never been true. Any web site can make a terms of use (and most do) that prohibit you scraping their data.

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

#160

Post by zmmmmm »

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.

There were a bunch of Twitter apologists a while back who went around saying "hey, they just want to communicate with you when your service gets popular so they can support you better, make sure you don't subvert their monetization". But no, it turns out they really do just want you to die and go away.

So I imagine those people who were doing the apologizing are surprised. And as most of the rest of us thought, Twitter has withdrawn from being a platform and is just a business now. Just like any other business, don't bother doing anything with them unless you draw it up in a contract in advance. The independent 3rd party ecosystem for Twitter is dead. But the good news is that the opportunity for a startup that wants to be a true platform in this space is riper than it has been for a while.

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