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Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

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Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#181

Post by dasil003 »

jcromartie wrote: post #169
dasil003 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But nothing, fundamentally, has changed. Twitter has always been grasping at straws for profitability, and they have always been in control of their platform. Would you have not been a fool to build something on Twitter last year? You would just be betting that they wouldn't introduce limits in the future, vs. knowing those limits today.

Well it's been sort of clear which way the wind was blowing for a while now, but definitely 3 or 4 years ago Twitter was bursting at the seems with developer support for innovation in all directions. It was an extremely welcoming platform compared to Facebook and iOS. Their developer PR has completely reversed that.

Of course if you're cynical you could have called it from the very beginning, but the point is it wasn't wholly unreasonable to believe that Twitter was willing to let developers capture real value in exchange for becoming gargantuan and providing critical infrastructure (ie. the old changing the world thing). Whereas now it's very very clear that Twitter is not willing to share any significant value. They want to capture it all, and they are adjusting the ToS to put them in a position to cut people off at the knees the minute they smell some value escaping from the ecosystem.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#182

Post by dasil003 »

saalweachter wrote: post #163
dasil003 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nev…

Fun Fact: MySpace launched August 2003 , Facebook February 2004 . For all intents and purposes, MySpace isn't any older than Facebook.

Didn't realize it was that close, but also I didn't go to ivy league :)

MySpace definitely hit the growth curve early since it was wide open, and Facebook wasn't open to non-college-students until when, mid-2006?

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#183

Post by RandallBrown »

danudey wrote: post #175
ido wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it send you an email if you get DMs?

I've turned that off, because I tend to get notifications in my clients. There's no good Windows client yet though, so when I'm on my gaming machine and don't have my phone handy, I use the web client for tweeting, and I never notice DMs.

I like Echofon a lot. Their Windows client is essentially just their firefox plugin running as it's own app, but it's pretty good.

I especially like that I can sync all the tweets I've read between my Windows machine at work, my iPhone, and my Mac at home. I don't know of any other app that works for those 3 platforms and has syncing.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#184

Post by danudey »

RandallBrown wrote: post #183
danudey wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've turned that off, because I tend to get notifications in my clients. There's no good Windows client yet though, so when I'm on my gaming machine and don't have my phone handy, I use the web client for tweeting, and I never notice DMs.

I like Echofon a lot. Their Windows client is essentially just their firefox plugin running as it's own app, but it's pretty good. I especially like that I can sync all the tweets I've read between my Windows machine at work, my iPhone, and my Mac at home. I don't know of any other app that works for those 3 platforms and has syncing.

I'll give that a try, but I don't care much for Echofon on any other platforms.

There is a service called Tweetmarker (http://tweetmarker.net) which some clients are now using to flag your last-read location amongst other clients on other platforms (e.g. Osfoora on Mac and Tweetbot on iOS).

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#185

Post by Firehed »

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).

Interesting point, although I don't consider email a platform like I do Facebook or Twitter. While there's no central database, there's a means of determining where the right server to talk to lives attached to the username.

We'd need some sort of DNS-for-handles in order to implement something similar for a new protocol, unless you want your handle tied to a domain (in which case you've just remade email with a RESTful API and a length limit)

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#186

Post by streptomycin »

Firehed wrote: post #185
streptomycin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Interesting point, although I don't consider email a platform like I do Facebook or Twitter. While there's no central database, there's a means of determining where the right server to talk to lives attached to the username. We'd need some sort of DNS-for-handles in order to implement something similar for a new protocol, unless you want your handle tied to a domain (in which case you've just remade email with a REST…

Look into StatusNet, it's a solved problem.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#187

Post by BerislavLopac »

tannerburson wrote: post #176
BerislavLopac wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

So you're wanting to reinvent XMPP?

Actually, XMPP the underlying technology we finally decided upon, just before the team fell apart. But the concept was to make a product that is based on it, but with a different feature set from the usual IM/chat clients we see.
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