Twitter's Abuse Of Its Outside Developers Is Its Downfall | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's Abuse Of Its Outside Developers Is Its Downfall

mikecanex.wordpress.com

64 pointsmikecane27 comments

I don't buy this at all. In fact, I don't buy the conventional wisdom that developers are what makes and breaks a platform. Developers do what Deep Throat suggests: they follow the money.

People often complain about the unpredictability and capriciousness of Apple's App Store policies yet it's still where developers flock to. Why? Because they make money. Those same policies arguably hurt developers but they definitely help the consumer, which ultimately does help the developer. Tae that as an example of developers not knowing what's good for them.

You see the same thing particularly in tech journalism: people often say the problem with, for example, Windows Phone 7 or WebOS is a lack of developers. No. The problem is a lack of users (and thus money to be made). Developers follow the money.

In the case of Twitter, I think it's downfall is that it is simply a very marginal product and has missed its opportunity to change that. Its usage is a lot lower than the number of accounts suggests [1]. I believe it was envisioned as a way of people sharing status updates in a more public fashion than Facebook. The reality of Twitter (IMHO) is that it's a way of following celebrities.

Twitter clients were doomed before they started, doomed to commoditization then cannibilzation that is. It was naive to go into building on someone else's platform any other way (yet many did seem to believe that Twitter was somehow "different").

I don't believe the existence of these apps is the reason for Twitter's success either. My personal opinion is that people decide to use Twitter and then look for an app to do it. Twitter lives and dies by the success of... Twitter.

[1]: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-how-many-use...

I agree. I'd argue that twitter's success made the developers, not the other way around. Certainly, the departure of developers is not going to unmake Twitter, not least because they have the resources to build their own clients now. If I were a TweetDeck user and TweetDeck vanished, I wouldn't stop using twitter, I'd just switch to a new client (as I have many times)...

Switch to a new client, as you have many times... but the developers don't matter?

Try having one official mobile client and a web client. And if you don't like either one, you're out of luck - and then the service is out of luck when you stop using it in favor of one with better software.

The relationship between developers and service providers is ideally symbiotic.

... built by a developer right?

Exactly - twitter is doing just fine. The article reeks of sour grapes.

"No. The problem is a lack of users (and thus money to be made). Developers follow the money."

Developers follow the money, and customers follow the developed products. It's a cycle. You can't just say 1 is the whole driving force when in reality, both are, and they drive each other as well.

This is totally correct, and needs to be thought about in any platform play. Users provide for the upper-bound in the cycle. Developers push the cycle to its next iteration. Money is the grease. Without all of them, the cycle doesn't flow and the platform reaches its maximum potential. Each successive iteration requires more effort, which means many more users spending more money on more developers output.

In the case of the iPhone developers either followed the customers, hence money, or they developed things because they loved their iPhone and/or Cocoa.

So maybe in order to bootstrap a platform you need to attract a bunch of customers including a healthy number of developers. If devs like the platform and there are potential customers that could create a spark.

    I don't buy this at all. In fact, I don't buy the conventional 
    wisdom that developers are what makes and breaks a platform.
    Developers do what Deep Throat suggests: they follow the money.

Sure a large body of developers follow the money, but a fantastic minority go and develop compensation-less bits of software such as Linux, Apache, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rails, Django, MySQL, Postgresql, Redis, NodeJS, etc. (Of course, as the projects mature and get noticed, money will appear and developers will flock to these platforms, too; and, of course, public recognition is a currency, too) Devs are not a homogeneous bunch and, unlike other groups, they can significantly affect the trajectory of a platform. See: Lego Mindstorms.

This is not to say that developers are magical and that users, marketers, etc are not needed.

    It was naive to go into building on someone else's platform any other 
    way (yet many did seem to believe that Twitter was somehow "different").

Also apparently naive: Zynga, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, PopCap, etc.

> Also apparently naive: Zynga, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, PopCap, etc.

FriendFeed and TweetDeck got gobbled up by the companies owning the platform they work on, and PopCap got bought by EA. Zynga could be brought to heel in an instant if Facebook wanted, too.

-Zynga could be brought to heel in an instant if Facebook wanted, too.

Good point, although I wonder if it would do no harm to Facebook either. They appear to be in a symbiotic relationship at this point. I bet Zynga would love not to depend on Facebook and vice-versa. Zynga probably is already mulling (if not preparing for) about porting their stuff to google+, just in case. I wonder how would Facebook take that.

I'd modify that a little, basically riffing on Marco Arment's proposal[1]: developers will do great things for a platform if we use it, if it's in popular use, and if there's money to be made. Twitter the service, I would say, has been fluttering between one and three of those things - the problem is that Twitter the company has been trying to choke out the "money to be made" criteria, and that, as you observe, drives developers away.

[1]: http://www.marco.org/2010/11/04/developers-dont-rush-to-new-...

True, Developers follow the money, but its the stuff they build for a platform that really helps that platform shine.

Your argument is exactly why Google+ is so dangerous for facebook and twitter, both have a very tortured relationship with 3rd party developers so if Google releases an api for google+ that gives developers an opportunity to make just as much money as twitter/facebook ... developers are going to be throwing up deuces to them and moving over to google since they can make just as much money with less stress.

Totally agree with this. Celebrities and thought leaders will make or break Twitter. If they leave all bets are off.

It's certainly reduced my goodwill towards the company and platform, both as a developer and a consumer. I won't use the Twitter API. Same goes for Etsy - if you check out the mailing list, as small as it is there's some serious discontent there. No coincidence some of the same people are involved in those two companies.

Twitter, Fred Wilson et al. appear to have made a calculation that keeping developers on their good side was not as important as their other plans. I don't think a wealth of Google+ apps is going to make or break the service, but it doesn't hurt. I'd certainly consider writing apps based on G+. I can picture the API being a lot more stable and professionally managed than Facebook's API, too.

"The same thing could happen with Google+. An app could come along that would bring sense to its UI/UX"

I'm not sure what this means. Google+ launched with an Android app that, to me anyway, has strong functionality, carries the same design as the website, and like the website, makes sense.

Is the author saying that:

1) They don't like the Google+ UI/UX and want a different design that would in their opinion "bring sense to it". This would be a small minority opinion, judging by the favourable reviews.

2) They pay no attention to android apps, and so haven't seen this app. Is it on iPhone?

It will be interesting to see what developers create from the g+ apis. I will be taking a look at integrating when they are released.

So Google may release G+ APIs, and every developer is going to drop Twitter for G+? Come on. Even if they did, who's to say Google won't pull the exact same stunt and leave developers in the cold?

Come to think of it, don't you think the importance of external developers in the Twitter ecosphere is ever so slightly overstated?

If I were a gambling man, and I am, I'd bet on Google being better to their devs than Twitter. Why? Past performance. They are a much larger community that has a LOT of goodwill in the developer community. Considering 90+% of their income is still ads, why would they throw that down the drain for something that barely affects their bottom line?

I have to quibble with Google having a lot of goodwill to burn. They withdrew any kind of usable search API a long time ago, considering Google's preeminence in search that is rather insular and not helpful for finding novel ways to build on search. They provided a translation API only to decide that it was too popular and pulling the rug out from under a lot of people who has built stuff on it.

A million upvotes for this. They'll punish people for trying to use their search results yet they scrape other websites and reformat their content for display in those search results! Bing and Yahoo have search APIs whereas they don't have them anymore. So goodwill is not guaranteed.

The translation API was marked as deprecated and will be phased out (along with them providing alternative APIs for you to transition to) because of abuse.

Making-up facts only weakens your argument.

My argument is a bit more nuanced than that, I don't expect to drop Twitter for Google+ (unless Twitter forces the issue, of course). Instead, I expect something like the following

1. Google+ APIs are released.

2. Developers add Google+ support to their Twitter apps (the way some apps have Facebook support). Beyond directly improving their apps, developers may have some extra motivation to do this because of the state of Twitter's developer relationships.

3. Google+ support in Twitter apps will accelerate the movement of users / conversations (not developers) from Twitter to Google+ that mikecane has already documented.

4. I can't see a viable countermove that Twitter could make, so the bleeding from Twitter to Google+ will just get worse. Enough cuts like this one and the bleeding will get critical.

Post Google+ I'm still engaged with Twitter, but I've pretty much "jumped ship" from Facebook. One big reason why is that I love my Twitter client (Plume), but I haven't found a Facebook client I consider acceptable (let alone one I'm happy with).

I'll admit to being only one data point, but I think it speaks to the impact external developers can have.

Even if they did, who's to say Google won't pull the exact same stunt and leave developers in the cold?

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Because Google has a solid track record of dealing fairly with developers ... they've been giving devs access to their offerings via apis long before twitter was even a blip on the radar

For a long time Twitter apps were developed simply to enjoy the Twitter hype rather than any financial gain. For some reason Mainstream media adopted Twitter as the invention of the century, so developing a unique Twitter app was a way to get linked to from some gushing NYT article.

Now that Twitter is less of a novelty, and the chances of making any money off it are not impressive, it's not such an attractive prospect, regardless of Twitter's own actions.

Upvoted because finally someone used the possessive its properly.

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