Twitter’s new developer terms ban third-party clients

engadget.com

40 points·samwillis··10 comments

So a couple days ago these were claimed to be bans due to "long-standing rules".

Someone at Twitter cracked time travel?

Long-standing in the sense of a standup meeting.

The time from the addition of the rules to the bans would have been an uncomfortably long time to remain standing up.

> use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.

I guess this means the end of nitter.net as well...

I guess for now... unless someone wants to literally scrape Twitter until they figure out how to ban that as well. I don't think it is worth the time developing for Twitter anymore. These apps brought users to Twitter and now they want to take them away.

> I guess this means the end of nitter.net as well...

Bitter already uses internal API endpoints and couldn't care less about the rules.

This is why one should always be wary of platform risk, as a startup founder. While it might be profitable in the short term to use someone else's platform, it always comes with the implicit risk of being shut down on a whim.

For growing an audience, email is platform with the lowest risk.

Does this applies to app like Buffer?

Add that to the list of corporate doublespeak from Twitter, like ‘we don’t shadow ban’ or ‘we have no political bias’.

The solution is to give users a toolkit for making 'apps'. They enter their username and install the generated app which does a thing. When they run the app, enter their password. 1P apps only.

Where is the line that separates a 1P app from a 3P app? As tech gets higher and higher this will be increasingly hard to answer.

Rotary dialing turned every caller into a telephone dispatcher/operator.

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