What Twitter's Announcement could have said | Hacker News Reader

What Twitter's Announcement could have said

dashes.com

79 pointsbriandear18 comments

Except 100,000 is not a lot of user tokens. In fact in the iOS world (where apps often cost $0.99) you could easily be failing if you only have 100,000 users.

And you don't mention the 200% cap on new users. That's not "many third-party Twitter clients have dedicated user communities and passionate developers, and with focus on keeping in step with our evolution, they should continue to thrive with their audiences." That's more like "third-party clients should stop developing, like now. There is no future for you with twitter".

My client of choice (Echofon) has a Twitter account with 1.7mil followers. We’re talking an order of magnitude bigger.

A doubling is not an order of magnitude increase, no matter how big the numbers are.

I believe (s)he was referring to an order of magnitude larger than the future 100k limit for new apps.

Sorry, maybe it's my getting older and more cynical, but the overly excited and positive tone of this rewrite makes it even easier to see through the spin he is trying to put on it. It still sounds exactly as bad as the original.

The start was a bit saccharine, but this post is laden with intent. Twitter's post lays down the law because they can. Anil's explains that the changes are so they can balance the needs of third party developers with Twitter's need to turn a profit. If you're announcing a potentially unpopular decision, you're going to be better off if you lay your cards on the table so people can tell that you're reasonable instead of a power-hungry jerk.

Indeed. The twitter announcement had the vague feeling of something produced after many heated words between product and engineering. This sounds like what it is, someone trying to sell their own personality.

Marco's analysis doesn't make it sound all that reasonable: http://www.marco.org/2012/08/16/twitter-api-changes

I'm concerned about the rules about embedding a tweet. So now there'll be all this widget stuff on websites when all I'm trying to read is a quoted tweet? I guess this move is to let Twitter track my behavior across the web (http://dcurt.is/twitter-is-tracking-you-on-the-web), but I worry about its impact on other sites that use the API.

Since when are embedded tweets API clients?

Marco's analysis makes it sound less reasonable because Marco's analysis is wrong, and your interpretation of Marco's analysis makes even wronger assumptions based off of his wrong assumptions.

They're not forcing you to use widgets, and you don't have to display tweets as proscribed by their API restrictions if you aren't doing it through a widget.

From the twitter announcement (https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api):

"To ensure that Twitter users have a consistent experience wherever they see and interact with Tweets, in v1.1 of the Twitter API we will shift from providing Display Guidelines to Display Requirements, which we will also introduce for mobile applications. We will require all applications that display Tweets to adhere to these."

If Marco's reading is wrong, it's still the most obvious reading of the original text.

Also:

"Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today."

Apropos to the Anil Dash version of the piece, the original one is already heavily tarted up with euphemisms like "guidance" where "warning" would more clearly convey their intentions.

I understand the type of petty social engineering that Anil has attempted here, by spreading "Awesome" and "Excitement" around and accentuating the good instead of the bad, but I think it does developers a great disservice to assume that the biggest problem with bad news was the tone of its delivery and not the news itself.

Polishing a turd decreases the value of both the polish and the turd.

<offtopic> Except when the Mythbusters are doing it, it's just pure awesome :) http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/polishi... </offtopic>

I think the layout part isn't going to effect the developers as much as their users, and their users are probably not going to twitter.com as it is.

Most people I know who hate the twitter layout use 3rd party clients to get around that, now if those 3rd party clients have the same ugly layout what does it matter? Ontop of that 100k users means those 3rd party clients will disappear.. and hopefully the end user will be annoyed.

Amazing what a change in tone will do for a product/API/launch announcement.

Yeh, but as someone in the comments notes look at the bits he actually left out - most of the restrictions for example

Twitter should have been little more considerate in its communication with its developer community. Anil Dash made all that sound comforting/positive. A must leason for all platform enablers.

Hired!

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