Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#91

Post by Jaigus » Sun, Mar 10, 2013, 10:54 PM UTC

TheZenPsycho wrote: post #61

nashadelic wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers of followers. You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans. Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-be celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get the word out there. > Charge third party developers for increased API capacity. For the same reason as…

> You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans. Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-be celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get the word out there. The celebrities in this case, are using twitter as an ADVERTISING platform. you said it yourself- would-be celebrities are trying to use twitter to "get the word out". is…

I think this makes sense. Even besides the celebrities on twitter, there are many party promoters, news outlets, bloggers, merchandisers, etc. that use twitter to advertise to their followers, and it provides a far more efficient advertising medium than the alternatives. The service charge for having a huge following would probably be well worth it (perhaps even negligible) to certain major account holders.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#92

Post by shurcooL » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 12:42 AM UTC

sidawson wrote: post #74

shurcooL wrote: post #70

Speaking of twitter API, is there any efficient way of getting just the single latest tweet from all the users someone follows?

Ha! No. Off hand, it'd require batching the users into groups of 100 and using an API call (/users/lookup) for each group. That gives you a user object each (which you don't care about), but also the latest tweet. The limit is 180/15 mins, ie a max of 18k in any 15 minute window.

Thanks!

That beats my first naive attempt, which was an API call (/statuses/user_timeline/.json?count=1) per user.

Hmm, I just noticed there was also (now deprecated) GET statuses/friends which did what I want. It is deprecated in favour of your suggestion.

Re: Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore

#93

Post by hboon » Mon, Mar 11, 2013, 10:04 AM UTC

glesica wrote: post #89

hboon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's improbable they would have the amount of users they have now if users had to pay a subscription. Do you think Facebook would?

Agreed, that's why I said "a few bucks a month from a few million users". I can't imagine that more than a couple million of their hundreds of millions of users would pay to remove the ads from their feeds.

Sorry, I mis-read that.

Perhaps they can charge for certain items that can be considered premium, such as verified accounts. I still doubt there'll be a couple million of users willing to pay though.