Twitter explains why developers shouldn’t build new clients
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
More importantly, what happens when something is not "ok", and for what level of ok-ness?
1. A client that spams people's Twitter streams without asking? Obviously not
ok, loss of API token.
2. A client that alters people's stream to include affiliate links? Presumably
not ok, loss of API token? (Questionable)
3. A client which "enhances" people's stream by making semantic clarifications
to content? Example: Imagine if http://twitter.com/english50cent could be
programmatically generated from @50cent. Is this not ok? It's certainly
innovative. What are the consequences? Where is the line?
4. A client that displays the Twitter stream verbatim but comes up with a new
visualization? Sounds like this is not ok too, since it might "confuse"
consumers? Do you lose your API token for this?
5. Generally, someone builds something that Twitter didn't think of and gains
mainstream usage, what is the consequence? What is the risk of Twitter making a
policy against it and shutting it down due to inconvenience to them?
The rest of Twitter's mechanics were invented by third parties. @replies were not invented by the Twitter team, nor RT's, nor hashtags, nor search.twitter.com (acquired), neither was the Twitter iPhone app (acquired), neither were url-shorteners (t.co copied tinyurl, bit.ly, etc).
Many of these mechanics came specifically from third-party consumer clients. Someone came along and made a client where words prefixed with a hash were searchable on Summarize, and now Twitter's entire business model seems to be based around that.
What would have happened if Twitter said "don't make any more clients, we got this" before all this happened?
What's going to happen if Twitter says this now, before who-knows-what happens?
Twitter's greatest strength has been in recognizing value and innovation created by the community of users, but suddenly this changed. I really hope Twitter reverts their policy/suggestion, and apologizes to the community. Right now it comes off as very arrogant, presumptuous, and stifling to innovation and further progress.
Twitter didn't invent the 140 character medium. It was a legacy from Twitter originally being very SMS focused.
Except for the fact that Twitter has a track record of screwing over developers who find said opportunities.
They seem to be saying that special-purpose clients would still be ok. For example, a SXSW iphone app that filtered and ONLY showed tweets with the #sxsw tag, and perhaps appended the tag to your own tweet. Not a path to riches, but you can see why such an app may be of use in certain situations. It seems to be allowed under these rules, but I'm not 100% sure.
What they've done is introduce uncertainty, which is worse for the ecosystem than anything else.
Twitter is totally correct--if you haven't entered this space by now, and you still want to, you are probably overlooking much more interesting opportunities.
Why would you develop a new Twitter client anyhow? You might make $5 a seat from a few thousand users who will expect you to maintain your product in perpetuity.
Have you by any chance used the newest version of the client recently? There's this bar at the top ... :P
Seeing as it's been, y'know, removed now.
Having said that, I am confused as to what happens if you do make a new competing client. Is this really just friendly advice to developers to not compete against Twitter, or will Twitter block your API access?
The writing was on the wall with the Tweetie acquisition and newtwitter, but now there's a blinking neon sign there.
I would agree with you if they had not changed their terms of service, to make it illegal for you to do <unclear> things.
A simple warning saying: "we intend to compete in the client space" would have been fair.
I get that they were trying to be transparent, but that's greatly overrated in this case. API guidelines should be crystal clear. There's no way for them to have made them crystal clear from the beginning given the rapid iteration of the business plan. So what Twitter should have done is just iterate the guidelines along with their business plan. Sure it's gonna piss people off when changes come, but there's no way to prevent that without freaking everybody out in advance.
Reading between the lines here it looks like their official client is going to be making them money in some capacity so they don't want people using 3rd party clients that might bypass that mechanism (whatever it is: ads, selling click data, whatever). That's just a guess.
Also notice their TOS is getting stricter. You cannot display data from alternate services alongside data from Twitter's API. Again, that only seems to make sense from an advertising perspective. Future restrictions are hinted at, too.
I used to wonder why the hell companies like Twitter would operate without any solid plans for making a profit, incurring huge costs and just taking on a massive amount of users. In hindsight it looks like you create an awesome free site to get a bazillion users and then once everyone is entrenched you can start to make it suck more in order to get paid.
I read it a couple of days ago, but isn't that limited to not being able to provide alternatives for the suggestions for who to follow, alternative trending topics, etc?
If I create an app that posts to Twitter so that someone else can consume that data, why not just cut out the middleman after the initial announcement?
I do think it would make a great discovery aggregator, now that it's up and running.