Twitter cuts off “find friends” access to Tumblr
marco.org
marco.org
I used to do Battlebots, Comedy Central had the television rights, at contract renewal time Battlebots and CC disagreed over who brought the most value to the table, they agreed to disagree and both walked away.
Clearly this will kill neither Twitter nor Tumblr but what it does do is put an obvious to fill gap in Tumblr's toolchest. Presumably they could add Identi.ca there where Twitter was, sure you wouldn't find any friends their yet but if Tumblr can convince their users to get an Identi.ca id when they create their Tumblr and then offer a chance to find people with it, it helps more than it hurts.
>if Tumblr can convince their users to get an Identi.ca id when they create their Tumblr and then offer a chance to find people with it, it helps more than it hurts.
And yes, Tumblr can do their own service the Tumblr version of Twitter, but then users are 'meh' because really they want just one thing to follow/monitor not a dozen (the Google+ problem in spades).
So what Tumblr really wants is a replacement for Twitter that has the same attributes, but creating that replacement is a made harder by the whole 'one place to go problem.'
One possible strategy is to empower a 'neutral' third party. As more and more people are alienated by Twitter, even competitors of Tumblr can see the benefit of empowering this neutral third party and so by not 'owning' the service they empower the service to be successful. I realize that is a bit zen but its really the only way this works as far as I can tell.
If the tech/vc/science community moved to app.net, the only thing left for me on twitter would be businesses abusing it as a form of RSS, which is by far the easiest content for them to publish to both Twitter and App.net in parallel. So really there are about 5k and maybe up to 50k people who need to move to app.net for me to no longer care about Twitter, and presumably at least 2500 of them have already signed up.
Personally I believe that the post-Twitter days will involve a shift away from micro sharing towards long form writing and better ways to have discussions with peers.
We have that. It's called blogging, and it came before Twitter. In order for you theory to make sense, you have to explain why people moved to Twitter in the first place, and/or if there is an uptick in blog activity
To read new posts I'm interested in, I have to remember to bookmark and revisit the blog regularly. I don't have a convenience glance-view of what's new in my personal blogosphere. RSS was intended to solve this, but never really had much mainstream uptake, and I don't suspect it will now either.
The real addictiveness of Facebook and Twitter come from the fact that they are capable of constantly providing you with a stream of interesting content, filtering out that which you don't like and floating up that which you do (the mechanisms for this between Twitter and Facebook are quite different).
Until blogging can have the same thing (tumblr I suppose is somewhat like that, but is still somewhat of a fenced yard for its own community), it won't be the same as sharing in the modern context.
Also: the issue for any network is that your 5k people will likely differ significantly from my 5k (or whatever the right number is). Extend that over an entire user population and now Metcalfe's Law takes hold, but in reverse.
"Urban" seems like a pretty fair term for teenaged/young adult hip-hop and related culture people, which does include more black people than the general population. However, a black 40 year old college cs professor or engineering professional is more likely to be on facebook (or linkedin, or researchgate, or hn) than twitter, so it's not really a racial thing, it's cultural, which is probably more tied to age and interests than anything else.
Really? What race was implied? The OP attributed mass market/middle school/urban ghetto with intelligence, which subsequently is correlative.
Not sure how race was ever implied here...
I live in the inner city. I'm white. My apartment is in an urban area, meaning I'm surrounded more by buildings than well-manicured streets and houses. I live in an urban environment. And we have people of all shapes, sizes and colors here.
When I lived in L.A. (North Hollywood, specifically), it was the same thing - urban (meaning, "of or pertaining to a city," look it up), but much more run-down. Not a lot of black people. More hispanics and white people. Myself included.
Communication depends on a common language to make it work. Just because you've decided that a common word means something different than its etymology - or its definition, even - doesn't make it so.
I'm not sure if you're being willfully obtuse or you actually have been living under a rock all your life and thus never heard the ubiquitous use of "urban" as code for "minority," but suffice it to say, the person you're responding to probably did not single-handedly plant all of the references to the phenomenon that exist in the world. Look it up: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=urban
The fact that you can neither grasp the concept of a connotation nor fathom the idea of a word being used euphemistically does not make its real-world usage go away.
hahahehe... you probably picked the worst example of a rapper's fans being primarily black. That or Mos Def :p
I wonder if they tried to negotiate behind the scenes, to get Tumblr to pay $$$ for that access, and couldn't come to an agreement. Or if this is part of a negotiating strategy. Charging for third-party access seems logical given that they referred to their follow graph's "great value" when they shut off Instagram. Simply shutting off access at any price, on the other hand, doesn't make sense.
I can only hope a mistake was made here as it sounds so absurd.
Twitter is a company that is in the business of making money. They are nominal value for themselves when they let third parties import their entire graph and providing incredible value for the importers.
This is a 100% rational business decision. If Twitter didn't offer friend finding on 3rd party networks before, it would be a bad business decision if they up and did it today.
No one will stop using Twitter because they can't use it to connect with their friends on another service.
It seems like to get popular you have to be open and then to make money you have to be closed.
What pisses me off is that twitter did have the opportunity to be an agent for change such as in the Arab spring. Im sure they could have made up revenue by charging for their API rather then cutting it off. Maybe not as much through controlling the entire ecosystem but at least they would have had a higher purpose then turning a huge profit (perhaps they could have just enough to keep the lights on?).
App.net can never become this change agent as they will be too expensive for most in developing countries to use.
Nothing wrong with that: getting burned by Twitter as a developer or user is worth other people's attention, as we all try to understand what to make of it.
Also, the apologist's response "it makes business sense" doesn't offset the fact that it is a dick move.
I find it odd and somewhat worrying that so many people seem adhere to the logic "if there's a business reason for it, it's okay". The way Twitter treats the ecosystem around Twitter is quite definitely not okay, no matter what the rationale behind it is.
I'm not saying it's smart. The level of legitimate FUD they're creating around their developer products is tantamount to sending Guido to kick down your door, point a meaty sausage finger one inch from the bridge of your nose and growl "Fuck You."
Personally I think they would have more to gain by being a better citizen of the open web development community, but clearly they've decided that they can't run the risk of anyone else finding a way to extract more value out of their users than they can. Is that wrong because in the beginning we thought they were fluffy?
Unfortunately at this point for Twitter, it's not just about optimizing this metric or that. They have millions of groups of people they need to satisfy (basically, everyone) at the same time as turning a buck.
Think of miners in SE Asia: digging up jungle to get to gold (Papua New Guinea). They have shareholders, management, employees, the local population, the local governement, the government where they are incorporated etc etc etc
Being a mass media consumer play like Twitter means the number of stakeholders you have is huge. And you have to keep them ALL happy to stay relevant (well, the majority... or a big number).
Who ever wrote that line is a genius.
It's a very insightful quote, and I think it speaks to a truism of any long-lived group of people (from companies on up to societies), or any entity with significant political or economic power.
Instagram, Linkedin, Tumblr...who's next?
They have gone crazy since they want to have their "consistent user experience"...
That's the thing, they just need to make the UX so badass that users will want to use your products instead of a 3rd party. Problem solved. Instead, they are just being lazy and squashing anyone who tries to innovate on their platform. Considering every feature on Twitter.com started on 3rd party clients, they're just shooting themselves in the foot.
But then again, that's assuming you believe it is about "consistent user experience", which I think it likely 5% of the real answer.
That's actually the public stock market. Private equity investors can vary anywhere from extremely patient, to being as impatient as public share holders. In Twitter's case, it's a 6-year old service that is peaking in valuation ($10 billion) unless it can find some new source of revenue growth, so I'd imagine the investors are getting a little ancy.
2010: $45 million 2011: $140 million 2012: ??
Sounds like they're doing ok to me.
I'd bet a large number of those folks are sales folks pushing Twitter's various ad options.
I wonder what all those employees are doing.
Finding new ways to limit the api and shoot themselves in the foot.
To me, the most likely reason which explains the "consistent user experience" quote is simply the matter of presenting ads, and being certain that every single user is seeing them, unfiltered.