The Twitter Platform
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
basically, if you were a platform developer ... you're in a dangerous position. You are snatching nickels in front of an oncoming bulldozer.
Building on top of anything is risky unless the platform (whatever that be - OS, Facebook, Twitter) provider gives you some guarantees (and you have enough trust in them that they will stick to those guarantees).
If you build your app on top of someone's service and the terms of use say "we reserve the right to change anything", it's like loading a shotgun, giving it to the service provider, and hoping they'll be nice to you.
If you don't/can't accept that risk, don't build on top of them.
Any business needs to mitigate risks, and I'm not trying to downplay that. You can see this with Zynga and Facebook, for example. At the same time, you have to remember that the platform is also a business, too. Platforms don't have a business without customers to build on top of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#History
Microsoft's entire corporate history is full of incidents like Twitter's new policies. Building on top of browsers sounds safer than the Microsoft/Netscape scenario until you consider the possibility that the browser vendor might launch a competitor and use the browser to promote it (e.g. MPEG LA vs. Google/WebM).
However, there is nothing wrong with building a business and relying on another service to provide key functionality.
When people say 'built on the back', I am visualizing that like an elephant with a bunch of people riding on its back. Don't be amazed when the elephant changes direction and you get bumped off.
If you can find a way to harness the skill and capabilities of the elephant, then do that. If you can help the elephant and yourself at the same time, you could be the next summize.
So, I would urge peole to leverage apis and platforms, but maybe don't build your business solely trying to get a piece of somebody elses action.
The only good answer I can come up with, at the moment, is that OSX has been around for longer, and there are plenty of successful apps on the platform to date - which shows that it can be done.
- A store in a mall... depends on the mall operator to maintain and promote the mall
- A auto parts manufacturer... depends on the auto manufacturer to sell parts and maintain the brand
- An MacOS developer... depends on Apple to sell Macs to supply a market.
- A franchisee (e.g. McDonalds)... depends on the corporation to promote the brand.
It's like selling craft through a website vs selling it through etsy.
You are seeing the issue too strongly through the lens of your own abilities. Try to see how it works for other people.
That's probably evidence enough that investing in developing for Twitter is kinda fruitless. There's just too much crud out there.
This coming from a Twitter iPhone app and web developer. Likely adding to the crud...
This is at variance with my recollection of events.
If you have a patentable concept, perhaps - but even then, patents need to be surprisingly specific. For a platform vendor like Twitter that makes it pretty easy to work around their claims.
For example, if you managed to patent the idea of broadcasting advertisements on twitter, the patent claim would probably have to say the method is something like "insert advertisement using Twitter API". Twitter can work around that by inserting the advertisement by other means.
In other words - don't waste you time with this strategy.
Given how many webpages look these days, with more ads than content, they can't really be blamed for being concerned about third-party advertising ruining the service.
Plus, even if your conduct is currently kosher, they can always invent a new policy that you've already broken tomorrow.
Hmm this sounds familiar...
http://www.socaltech.com/twitter_takes_aim_at_ad_ly_bans_in_...
At first I was happy that the service I work on was not banned by this ToS change. Even though we use twitter data for monetisation, we don't insert data into timelines.
However, when I look at the services that have now been banned, I can't see any warning signs other than that they were competing with Twitter for monetising their data. This is what my service does. Even though it's not currently banned, doesn't it make sense to abandon development now? The best I can hope for it that it isn't wildly successful, so Twitter doesn't consider it competition...
Every time I read Twitter's explanation for the situation, it reads as "we know our monetisation strategy can't compete with third parties in the short term, so we're banning all competition". Hardly conducive to fostering the best solutions, particularly when Twitter will always have the upper hand with their "official" monetisation platform and analytics for resonance, anyway. What's even worse is the the new ToS is still completely ambiguous. Until I saw Peter's post here I had no idea that the ban was only in the publishing end, not insertion.
Of course all this makes sense from Twitter's perspective, but for third parties... that just leaves us on an ever changing playing field with invisible goals. I could have lived with rules and rev share additions, but completely banning competition... not so much.
PS what's the point of this paragraph from the blog post? "We understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money. We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform." a slap in the face? We understand that we've wasted your time and money, so here's the next thing for you to waste time and money on. No guarantees, no apologies.
Kinda lame though. They could have just made it part of their TOS. Only X number of ads can be shown after X tweets.
Twitter must have $$ in the eyes.