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Twitter Just Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature

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Re: Twitter Just Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature

#41

Post by babs474 »

mitchellhislop wrote: post #40
babs474 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. I'm going through this exact same thing with the reddit api and chrome app store. A lot of api providers seem to have a few limited (mostly lame) use cases in mind. Developers by their nature are creative boundry pushers. Conflict is inevitable. I just wish api providers would take greater care in thinking about and describing what exactly is going to be allowed and not. Rather than putting something o…

Uneditreddit?

Yeah.

First I used the reddit api, when reddit cut that off I was able to crowdsource a data feed from users through a browser extension.

Then reddit convinced google to have unedditreddit removed from the app store. I switched to a firefox extension now so we will see what happens.

Re: Twitter Just Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature

#42

Post by NewAccnt »

anu_gupta wrote: post #27
meritt wrote: post #20

Twitter wants to validate each domain that has a card so they can approve & exert control. They cannot control what products a ribbon customer promotes via ribbon. If I wanted to sell illegal drugs or child pornography photographs, those would show up on twitter.com & twitter apps in a nice card-like experience complete with a 'Buy Now' button. That's why they shut it down.

There are plenty of porn and drug references on Twitter already. Twitter doesn't care. It's very clear that Twitter want to control every possible aspect of the monetisation of Twitter.

Given the earlier fallout with the twitter 3rd-party clients, and similar things going on on other "platforms" I think we need a new name for these services other than "platform" (since it is not stable, it's a bit of a misnomer) but more specific than "service".

I propose "network traps", "progress sinks" or "sucker tub". I don't know but I keep getting a recurring imagery when thinking of these situations as of someone building a house on a raft, which immediately capsizes, but the buoyancy of the house causes the raft to lift out of the water.

Re: Twitter Just Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature

#43

Post by piptastic »

kloncks wrote: post #14
tbrownaw wrote: post #13

So how did this happen? Did someone at Ribbon not bother to check the TOS? Did they check and just think they wouldn't get caught? The article says Ribbon is trying to contact Twitter to find out what happened, I'd think it would make sense to have somewhat closer relations with anyone who has that much power over your company, so you could find out before they shut you down.

From our statement on our blog: "We’ve had discussions with Twitter in the past, and are eager to find a way to work together."

In these discussions, did they say, "Sure, go ahead.", and then shut you down?

Or did they say "There is no way you can do this, and we will shut you down."?

'Discussions' gives us no information.

Re: Twitter Just Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature

#44

Post by ElginEudor »

It's called PCI. Unless there was a contract between Ribbon & Twitter this is not at all okay since they were taking payments within the same origin of twitter.com, thus bringing twitter.com into scope of PCI compliance for Ribbon. This was a really basic mistake if there was no contract. Everyone who knows anything about PCI understands this very well.

Re: Twitter Just Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature

#45

Post by [deleted] »

babs474 wrote: post #36
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't touch Twitter without a contract signed by my company and by Twitter. Any attempt to utilize their content consumers for anything other than reading content you produce has been shown to be at extreme risk of termination. I don't believe Twitter doesn't know how they are going to generate revenue. I'm not convinced they can actually implement their ideas, but, if they had no ideas, I think they would be le…

You are right. I'm going through this exact same thing with the reddit api and chrome app store. A lot of api providers seem to have a few limited (mostly lame) use cases in mind. Developers by their nature are creative boundry pushers. Conflict is inevitable. I just wish api providers would take greater care in thinking about and describing what exactly is going to be allowed and not. Rather than putting something o…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Just Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature

#46

Post by zzzeek »

_red wrote: post #17
josh2600 wrote: post #4

Are you surprised? Why don't we all go back to AOL and Geocities. The problem with Twitter is that it is not clear exactly what their approach to their revenue problem might be. I understand they want to monetize their API but does that go hand-in-hand with quashing every potential competitor who happens to use the API with a modicum of success? I'm bearish about any company that builds a data warehouse on the basis…

Why don't they just charge for this? You want to setup an in-stream payment solution? Great here is the API - its .10 each time its called (or whatever). Further, why does twitter make it hard to pay them for API use?

maybe because it would turn twitter into a cheap looking barrage of pay links.

Re: Twitter Just Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature

#47

Post by zzzeek »

babs474 wrote: post #36
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't touch Twitter without a contract signed by my company and by Twitter. Any attempt to utilize their content consumers for anything other than reading content you produce has been shown to be at extreme risk of termination. I don't believe Twitter doesn't know how they are going to generate revenue. I'm not convinced they can actually implement their ideas, but, if they had no ideas, I think they would be le…

You are right. I'm going through this exact same thing with the reddit api and chrome app store. A lot of api providers seem to have a few limited (mostly lame) use cases in mind. Developers by their nature are creative boundry pushers. Conflict is inevitable. I just wish api providers would take greater care in thinking about and describing what exactly is going to be allowed and not. Rather than putting something o…

> Rather than putting something out there, having developers throw things at the wall, then banning things you don't like after the fact.

I would think that being able to operate that way is exactly the reason you want to offer an API. So that your users can come up with ideas for you. Trying to anticipate up front every conceivable use of an API and publishing it with a huge list of rules based on conjecture makes for a pretty crappy API.

Re: Twitter Just Shut Down Ribbon’s Newly Launched In-Stream Payments Feature

#49

Post by omarrr »

Jsarokin wrote: post #37

Throwing in my 2 cents: It looks like what Ribbon submitted to the Twitter validator was a video using the "player" card: http://cl.ly/image/2R2i1J302Z2g The player card is designed to handle embedding videos, which is what Ribbon initially showed, however when they launched their new feature they morphed the embedding options to display a custom in-stream purchase button / unit. In reality, they should have just use…

Completely agree. It's clear that they found a loophole in order to do something that twitter had no intentions of permitting.

It is very likely that a user would find these cards and inadvertently start a purchase without realizing that this actually not supported by twitter.

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