Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

>The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem

I honestly don't think that matters that much. Yes it sucked to be the developer of a profitable Twitter client, but from Twitters point of view, those clients where potentially in the way of profit. Unless Twitter charged the third party clients for access to their API, how where they suppose to help Twitter make money? Increased user based? If Twitter can't make money on the users they have now, getting more won't help them.

So many people claim that love Twitter, it's their only source news, the way they keep in contact and so on. Fine, pay Twitter $20 per year, that seem reasonable, and it would keep spammers and trolls of Twitter.

View on HN

You are viewing the 3rd party clients as a negative. This was their greatest asset. Instead of destroying them, why not give them an SDK? If they put that SDK to show promoted tweets and other adverts in the stream, they could have sold far more inventory and still have all the metrics they need to show advertisers.

Instead, they destroyed them, destroyed the user growth they provided, destroyed the engagement they provided, and worse destroyed far more earnings potential they could have had if they instead just worked with all the clients to get the ad placements in there. They tried to copy Facebook and how they did things, but instead destroyed their most prized asset.

The SDK would only be able to show the advertisers that the ads where pushed to the clients, not that it was actually shown. So I doubt that would sit well with advertisers. Even if tracking normal online ads is just as sketchy.

Still don't feel it like would have made much of a difference. Twitter still have more than enough traffic, on which is fails to monetize.

And again, what's wrong with paying for Twitter? $20 per year for personal account, $300 for businesses.

The SDK would only be able to show the advertisers that the ads where pushed to the clients, not that it was actually shown.

The apps themselves wouldn't have been anonymous. If many of one's ads were seen through TwitView3000, one might have had reason to examine TwitView3000 to see how ads were handled in that app. If one had discovered that ads were dropped, a single phone call would have been enough to revoke the app's API key.

> what's wrong with paying for Twitter? $20 per year for personal account, $300 for businesses.

Well, there's plenty wrong with the system you describe. Is Taylor Swift's account personal or business?

To me it seems like it would make sense to charge for accounts based on the number of followers. Followers are what make an account valuable.

Completely agree. An SDK with advertising that led to revenue for the developers would have been a major boon.... and potentially unlocked a lot of innovative ideas and approaches.

They, for example, could have added an adsAllowed flag to the API. If you deselect it, you get a 15min delayed feed. Want the recent one? Show the ads. Even an affiliate program for popular clients, sharing ad revenue with them, is not something I would consider totally unreasonable.

But the reality is, unless somebody from Twitter shows up, we will not know which options they investigated, and why the alternatives could not beat the solution they went with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com