I find it ironic that the company that's created Bootstrap - an entire toolkit encouraging developers to adopt their site's visual style - is so opposed to any other aspect of following their lead.
Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
31–40 of 187 posts
Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
#32Twitter wants to give you access to the data. Their client is their main product. Thus, every 3rd party client is competing with their main product, that seems to be a fact. Theres no way to stop you from building one anyway, twitter knows that. If you go against their rules, you're a revolutionary, and if you win that revolution, they'll have to deal with you. You can't expect however, that the incumbent is going to…
>Their client is their main product
Is it? Their revenue stream will be coming from paid tweets, so aren't the tweets themselves their main product?
It seems grossly unfair that they punish other 3rd party clients who are doing exactly what Tweetie were doing 2 years ago.
Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
#33Earlier 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…
The possible difference there is that app.net has both a business plan (sell access to post to the service) as well as a feedback model if they do something stupid (people will stop paying them).
Sure, that's a difference, but a rather incremental difference IMHO. Not nearly as big a difference as federation and open source, which is what we really need to break out of the walled gardens.
Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
#34If app.net gets the userbase, i.e. the people I want to follow, i will be over there in a flash.
Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
#35[deleted]
Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
#36This 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 disagree with is that this will doom Twitter. It will not. They've already achieved a certain level of success. Most people use and will continue to use the Website or the official client and be happy with that.
I do believe that Twitter is doomed to be acquired however. Apple seems the likely frontrunner for this but I think Twitter needs Apple more than Apple needs Twitter at this point.
Twitter is ultimately infrastructure and infrastructure seems doomed to commoditization. Twitter has eyeballs too but social platforms seem fickle at best. There is nothing preventing Twitter from becoming the next Myspace.
There are many reasons I'm glad about Facebook's floundering market debut. This is one of them: it's taking the wind out of the sails of the social hype (IMHO).
Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
#37In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social analytics”, and “Social influence ranking” Would he rather they put one-paragraph labels on each quadrant? Sometimes phrases that sound like MBA buzzwords (and might be MBA buzzwords) are actually useful too.
I think he'd rather Twitter take a firm, unchanging stance as to their policy toward third-party applications built on the Twitter-as-a-platform concept. The buzzword-filled doublespeak in their blog post serves only one purpose: to intimate change while keeping their future options open. Unfortunately, that makes their policies (current or otherwise) about as firm as a loaf of bread.
If so, he didn't express it that way. It just sounds like an unnecessary sideswipe.
Anyway, I think the matrix does make it more clear than just saying "we don't want 3rd party twitter clients...and some other stuff".
Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's get one thing straight: these are not products, they're services. Nobody is producing anything here.
Do you not consider a releasable piece of software a 'product'?
I would tend to think of the whole thing as a service (e.g. "Twitter" - all of its apps, data, brand, users, infrastructure), versus individual apps (e.g. "TweetDeck") being "products".
Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
#39This 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…
Interesting point about being acquired.
Do you think perhaps restricting 3rd party clients is a way to make them more appealing to a potential buyer like Apple?
Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
#40Twitter's developer problem is probably at about level 9 right now. My question is what's really the big deal. Twitter can do what they want and really more to the point, I don't think Twitter should be the primary focus of innovation from our community. It's a stream of mostly nonsensical 140 char messages. I get it it, it's amazing ... but come on, we can get past Twitter.