Twitter is a tragic tale | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is a tragic tale

threads2.scripting.com

60 pointsxivSolutions16 comments

I know this has been mentioned before, but Twitter should just charge for access to their API. They are really squandering opportunities, and I hope they will take a look in a new direction. Perhaps they could take a page from LinkedIn as well, and offer premium accounts where they save every tweet.

Personally, I think Twitter Ads are useless. For the price, I would have a hard time imagining that marketers would not get a better return out of Adsense or FB Ads.

Wouldn't that be the fastest way to kill any innovation at once? Paid APIs aren't exactly the most popular thing out there (specially on consumer sites), and I don't think enough people would pay for it/represent a sizeable chunk of profit...

I am just trying to provide alternatives. I have no idea what twitters revenues are. Perhaps a tiered system like mailchimp has? If you have under a certain amount of requests it would be free. Paid applications which heavily use the API could be charged more.

Also, as I mentioned in my comment above, I think a premium subscription would be in order. I would pay for a service that saves tweets, and provided basic analytics. I am just trying to get the conversation going about alternatives. If anyone else has possible revenue alternatives for Twitter, I'd be interested to hear them.

While Salesforce is not a pure model of a paid API, they're not exactly unpopular.

When original Google Maps API came out, developers literally were begging Google to introduce paid APIs for some of the stuff they were writing. I went to a maps meetup in Sunnyvale, and that quickly became the subject of the night.

Developers understand that paid APIs

(a) offer SLAs

(b) usually are not changed drastically, which for maps scenario allows embedding them into hardware

(d) hint at what developer's pricing schema should be (e.g. if API charges a monthly subscription fee, makes sense to build the product around that, if it's number of queries to the API, makes sense to incorporate the final product into a few options for light, medium and heavy users).

(I clicked to downvote your comment by accident, while trying to upvote it. So sorry, my stubby fingers don't work well with small icons on an ipad :( )

Twitter does charge for it's APIs for large users of it. See DataSift and GNip.

An additional tragedy not mentioned is the broken circle of trust between developers, users, and service providers.

In the future, developers will be more skeptical of promising platforms, and users will be less willing to turn over their content and data to platforms that may only temporarily in a state of free and openness.

On the bright side, this may lead to more explicit, contractual openness for commercial platforms or the stronger emergence of completely open platforms as users and developers learn the lesson that it matters.

Social startups might take this to heart - as Google and others already have. Users and developers may well start to pay attention to that buried EULA and its back-out provisions designed to make sure you can assure investors that betraying your base for cash will always be a possibility.

As for IBM, its market cap is quite close to Microsoft, so I think they did reasonably well (they could have done even better if they've bet on software earlier, but that doesn't mean they should necessarily "bet outside their walls"). Also, the fact that they invested everything they had on an "open" platform (the PC architecture) is kind of an agreement to what you said they should have done... No?

As for Twitter, I find it funny that people see it as such a revolution. I mean, it's just a little social network with a very limited scope and features... I don't jmagine it revolutionizing more than it already does (it's a great outlet for the media, celebrities and breaking news, but I don't think it's sooo much more)... Or is it? :)

IBM's market cap is now what MS' is for a different reason. When it comes to the PC war and the bets that were made, IBM lost. The lost so bad in fact, they had to completely scrap their entire PC business by selling it off.

IBM now makes most of its money through consulting, software services, and enterprise hardware and software.

It was, for a short while a few years ago, where I had the most interesting conversations and met the most interesting new people.

I think the limited scope of Twitter is/was one of the strengths of the platform. Unlike the various walled gardens growing out of every corner, trying to be everything to everyone, Twitter was very effective for a specific style of communication.

They should monetize access to their API with some sort of tiered data-volume scheme. Under a certain amount per month = free, over that, begins to incur charges. They could also allow anyone to develop against it, with a license which acknowledges a cut of revenue over a certain amount.

They think that the only reason to create something is to make money. The more money the better. They're not wrong.

Arrgh... no. There are lots of reasons to create things. The biggest being personal gratification. The only reason to fund some creation is that long ago someone noticed a correlation between giving people money to do their thing and turning the results into profit.

I wonder why Twitter has never tried to do anything interesting with all the data they own. I can think of so many ways they can mine useful data from them (think of brand sentiment analysis). Or - how about exposing metrics like views, clicks etc. to businesses in a Pro account?

This is one area where I think Twitter is actually smart. Instead of analyzing the firehose, they sell the firehose to dozens of competing companies who pay for the privilege of mining it. Twitter gets monopoly profits and we get a market of competing analyses.

Maybe because 95% of the data stream on Twitter is meaningless, random, stream-of-consciousness stuff?

There are some that disagree that the noise is useless:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003

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