Tweetro Slams into Twitter 100K Token Limit | Hacker News Reader

Tweetro Slams into Twitter 100K Token Limit

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What is going on at Twitter that they would think its in their long-term best interests to cap API usage, as opposed to, for example, having a paid offering, a la GMaps?

I understand their drive standardization, pushing their own apps, etc. but at some point, one starts to think that if walling off their garden is really their aim, they should just deprecate the API and be done with it already, rather than the death of 1000 cuts that they're subjecting the ecosystem too.

They don't even have an app for Windows 8 to begin with. If they are going to prioritize their monetization over user experience, they're going to learn it hard some day.

Sometimes when an organization wants rid of something (semi-) popular they use a two step process - first change it so it's unpopular, then kill it.

That way you don't have to deal with the PR of killing something popular.

That's not how advertising companies work. When someone pays you money to advertise for them, they are extremely particular about how the message is delivered. Twitter can not promise its customers that its message will be delivered per their agreement if they aren't directly in control of the client.

The irony here is that the policy is to direct people to use official clients for Twitter, of which one exists on Windows 8, aside from the website.

The error is so non-descriptive that users are likely going to blame the app developer for being unable to use the app, rather than Twitter for having an arbitrarily defined token limit.

It'd be less frustrating if they didn't completely neglect their official clients. And their website isn't exactly perfect, either.

Shame, really, because custom Twitter clients have been great for experimenting with the API and even UX design, and it being a full on client means enough people use them to test those experiments.

It looks like developing an app for the Twitter API is a lose-lose situation. If your app becomes popular, you are bound to one day hit one of their API limits or just simply be revoked access altogether.

Twitter promotes a couple companies to buy tweets above the 100k API limit. We use Datasift for our app and it's fairly cheap and painless. Their API has a few nice things too like batching.

There are options, it looks like if you are going into building a Twitter client and you are not charging for the app, you're going to have a bad time.

I understand that the twitter 100K Token limit applies on a per application basis.

What prevents an publisher from releasing their App with multiple names/incarnations/artwork - each of which would have 100K users.

I.E. Tweetro Pro, Tweetro Advanced, Tweetro Universal, Tweetro Media edition, etc...

Theoretically nothing, but who wants to break up their product like that? The number of different versions would scare away users and they probably wouldn't reach 100k in the first place. How would they identify versions that have reached a token limit?

Actually theoretically Twitter will probably revoke all their tokens and their API key for trying to run around their rules.

They'd probably get all of their Twitter API key's revoked for "Duplicate Functionality." The 1.1 Developer Rules of the road are pretty harsh if you're syndicating tweets.

What prevents it is the non-existence of a contract. Twitter devs live at the mercy of Twitter Inc, which can and will alter the rules as it benefits them. You're not going to skirt the rules with a technicality.

If it weren't for the many applications that helped grow Twitter, this service would not be nearly as successful as it is today. Imposing these arcane limits is a slap in the face to the developers who made Twitter so popular in the first place.

This should also serve as a warning to people who build on top of other social networks. These networks oftentimes can only rely on their own information to make money, which increases the probability that they will block access to user data (or at least make it very difficult to access).

Start charging money for Tweetro. Problem solved.

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