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Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

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Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#81

Post by jsilence »

rjsamson wrote: post #26

I don't see this ending well for them. Alienating the very developer base that helped them grow as a platform early on is a huge mistake. As an aside, I feel even better about backing App.net after seeing this news.

But who is keeping app.net from doing the same thing once they killed Twitter and reached a size where they can say: Thanks for all your friends, now get off of our platform.

We need open protocols and a decentralized social network where we have different implementations with focus on different use cases which are still able to communicate with one another.

A good chunk of the protocols and implementations is already there with OAuth, Activity streams, salmon, RSS and such. And there are already open sourced implementations like status.net and others alike.

The solution is already there. We only need to start using it.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#82

Post by mh- »

brown9-2 wrote: post #68
mmahemoff wrote: post #2

In 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.

Ok, so what is "Social CRM"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_CRM

Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is use of social media services, techniques and technology to enable organisations to engage with their customers.

Social CRM is often used as a synonym for Social Media Monitoring, where organisations watch services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for relevant mentions of their product and brand and react accordingly.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#83

Post by natrius »

pedalpete wrote: post #77
joering2 wrote: post #51

Sometimes I tend to see the dark side of human in everything they do. Sorry, its just the way I am. I say when twitter was still this little chick, their approach was "we love all users, we welcome engineers; build amazing tools and surprise us!". I think the reason for that was to speed up the process of spreading the word - a simple fact that geek working on twitter 3rd party is still a human with plenty of friends…

Square doesn't have a network effect, it doesn't really matter if one store uses square, and the neighboring store uses google wallet, dwolla, or something else.

Square and payment systems in general most certainly do have network effects. For instance, I don't have a Discover card because it's not worth the hassle of checking whether each merchant accepts it.

Network effects are the lion's share of the justification behind Square's Starbucks deal.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#84

Post by tnorthcutt »

pedalpete wrote: post #77
joering2 wrote: post #51

Sometimes I tend to see the dark side of human in everything they do. Sorry, its just the way I am. I say when twitter was still this little chick, their approach was "we love all users, we welcome engineers; build amazing tools and surprise us!". I think the reason for that was to speed up the process of spreading the word - a simple fact that geek working on twitter 3rd party is still a human with plenty of friends…

Square doesn't have a network effect, it doesn't really matter if one store uses square, and the neighboring store uses google wallet, dwolla, or something else.

Yes it does. If their mobile payment app becomes the de facto standard, not accepting payment from that app could become as bad as not accepting credit cards.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#85

Post by bad_user »

virmundi wrote: post #71
ricardobeat wrote: post #58

> To prevent malicious use of the Twitter API and gain an understanding bla bla bla... Translation: so that we can charge even light API users. This will surely backfire - some services will switch from API usage to screen-scraping, resulting in an even higher load on twitter's servers.

At that point Twitter will simply block IP address, or some such. Sure there will be a game of catch me if you can, but the end is that no one really wins, and Twitter may suffer because people will use it to bad mouth Twitter. Enough user sentiment, even if it start from the devs of a few highly used apps, and Twitter might want to reconsider.

If the client is native, you can do that scrapping client side. Say your app has 10000 users. Assuming they can detect this (not likely) what are they gonna do? Block 10000 IPs?

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#86

Post by bad_user »

virmundi wrote: post #71
ricardobeat wrote: post #58

> To prevent malicious use of the Twitter API and gain an understanding bla bla bla... Translation: so that we can charge even light API users. This will surely backfire - some services will switch from API usage to screen-scraping, resulting in an even higher load on twitter's servers.

At that point Twitter will simply block IP address, or some such. Sure there will be a game of catch me if you can, but the end is that no one really wins, and Twitter may suffer because people will use it to bad mouth Twitter. Enough user sentiment, even if it start from the devs of a few highly used apps, and Twitter might want to reconsider.

If the client is native, you can do that scrapping client side. Say your app has 10000 users. Assuming they can detect this (not likely) what are they gonna do? Block 10000 IPs?

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#87

Post by shardling »

dm8 wrote: post #52
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…

Everyone cites Myspace. Either Twitter or Facebook does something controversial and we hear everyone citing Myspace. Myspace didn't lose it's user base due to amazing UX for end-user. They lost their user base due to combination of bad UX and "mobile" user base. Majority of Myspace users were teenagers and by the time they went to college they had hot new social network in form of Facebook, which was exclusively for…

>Twitter on the other hand offers good UX

Every time I go to twitter in a browser I want to punch whoever designed it in the face. It is by far and away the most annoying site I encounter on a daily basis, which is impressive given that all I want it to do is display plaintext.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#88

Post by voyou »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #13

Wonder how they got the bright idea to advocate limiting the quadrant named "Consumer Engagement". Surprised they didn't try to make it a bit less obvious.

The blog post is actually annoyingly ambiguous - do they want to limit all the stuff in the "consumer engagement" quadrant, or just the "traditional clients," while encouraging other sorts of "consumer engagement" (they mention, and don't make clear if they're in favor of or against, Favstar and Storify).

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#89

Post by oracuk »

streptomycin wrote: post #15
andrewfelix wrote: post #7

Utter hypocrisy that they're discouraging third party clients, after having acquired one. app.net suddenly looks more attractive.

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 successful ecosystem isn't. A well-managed platform ultimately provides the most benefits to the platform owner whereas a successful ecosystem provides the benefits to the most successful entities within it, a playing field to compete within.

Re: Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

#90

Post by fauigerzigerk »

joering2 wrote: post #51

Sometimes I tend to see the dark side of human in everything they do. Sorry, its just the way I am. I say when twitter was still this little chick, their approach was "we love all users, we welcome engineers; build amazing tools and surprise us!". I think the reason for that was to speed up the process of spreading the word - a simple fact that geek working on twitter 3rd party is still a human with plenty of friends…

It doesn't make sense to make this personal. Business models inevitably change when startups grow up. You can't expect a company that needs to create network effects to act exactly the same as one that needs to exploit them in order to make some money and pay back investors.

Twitter got the funding to build that massive infrastructure only because someone believed that they would eventually be able to monetize it. Twitter is not a public utility and everyone knew it.

The conclusion isn't to never use something one particular guy does. The conclusion is this: If you build on someone elses infrastructure, make a contract or make sure you exit before the tide turns.

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