What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit
marco.org
marco.org
Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have.
What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.
I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's perfectly reasonable of them to not make any special exemption. If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter then they'd likely give you a higher limit, but that's not the case...
Native > Web, if you do it right. Web has a lot of UX limitations native apps don't have.
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Unless by native you mean written in a language that only works on a single platform.
Emphasis on "supposed". It doesn't always do it, and definitely never to everyone's taste. Hence the custom clients.
> I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's perfectly reasonable of them to not make any special exemption. If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter then they'd likely give you a higher limit, but that's not the case...
By now I doubt anyone is truly surprised, but it's disappointing nevertheless. Twitter's success is partly built on the explosion of Twitter clients that allowed Twitter to evolve faster than its dev team could follow (hence all the scaling issues). Then they bought a few players in the Twitter client market. And now they've strangled all the ones that remained in that market.
So basically, Twitter now has an obvious and provable history of leaving things open, deciding that thriving third-party market X is nice, stepping into it themselves, and killing everyone else there.
That's not a reputation I'd like to have for my business, when it is a piece of underlying infrastructure that depends on others to make it thrive.
Anyone starting a business from today onwards and having any critical dependency or reliance on Twitter is insane.
People with large amounts of money rarely get that way by sharecropping for companies like Twitter, so it may not be as big a problem as you fear.
That it's a terrible experience on many fronts, that it's slow as molasses (especially on mobile networks), that composition sucks, that multiuser blows, that it's got no idea where you left off and doesn't care, etc...?
> This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.
Crappy?
That's exactly what happened here. Twitter does not currently have a native Win8 client, and a native client has always been a value-add for Twitter's users - many people prefer to have an always-on Twitter widget on their machine that pushes messages to them, over a browser window they have to poll.
I haven't used this software myself, but it certainly seems like something that is welcomed by Windows users and improves the experience for the relevant set of Twitter users.
The root problem here is unsurprising: for many web startups what's good for users is not good for the company. The modern, ad-driven web company is a precarious balance between tending to the sheep and throwing them at the wolves as hard as you can.
While that may be true, Twitter has a lot of its popularity and mechanics to thank for from the third party apps.
Think of hashtags and slashtags: http://gigaom.com/2010/04/30/the-short-and-illustrious-histo...
Even the verb 'to tweet' and the bird imagery allegedly came from outside of Twitter.
If it weren't for Loren Brichter's app Tweetie, I probably wouldn't have even bothered with using Twitter.
The message they want you to have is "build boring enterprisey stuff".
Notifications. Multiple accounts. Filters. Speed.
Twitter.com compares to (many) Twitter clients like 2004 webmail compares to native e-mail clients of the time.
Because Twitter provides native clients for Android and iOS tablets their web site is simply not optimised for touch. It's crappy on Windows 8, plain and simple.
Moreover, it works remarkably great in Win8. Add a direct link to twitter.com on your start page, and it feels like a fullscreen native app in virtually every way.
I dunno. Ask the 100,000+ people that wanted to use the client.
Sadly what makes Twitter more valuable for a user does not necessarily make the user more valuable for Twitter.
Why then have people still been using the facebook app?
When you realize the answer to that, you'll understand.
What's wrong with everyone using the same web browser? After all, that's exactly what the HTML standard is for, right?
Yes. Opening a web browser, typing twitter.com on a phone keyboard, waiting for it to load, logging in on a phone keyboard, then using a mobile site that is built to target as many users on mobile across different devices and versions is much less enjoyable than tapping the twitter icon on a phone and having it open an app built for that phone and that os, then load tweets without further action.
>This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.
That line of reasoning was true before 2008-2010, before smartphones became ubiquitous and before smart phone app experiences became way better than their mobile counterparts. Using the web on a phone is not this great, fun experience. It's typically a pain that involves a lot of typos, and a lot of zooming in, zooming out and scrolling.
Atta: I built a core-feature Twitter client!
Twitter: Sorry, we're not approving your core-feature Twitter client.
Who is surprised? How is this news? Were you expecting them to not apply their own rules? It seems like a clear-cut case, and concluding "don't build anything for Twitter" is just throwing a temper tantrum.
Maybe the "Don't build anything for Twitter" thing is a little heavy handed but the fact remains that if you build something that you hoping will get more than 100k users you can't count on twitter as a stable platform.
a) changing the rules of the game and b) leaving you in the dark of what the actual rules _are_
Make business with people that care about your business. Twitter clearly doesn't.
why anyone would expect a business to do anything else is beyond my understanding!
Not that there isn't precedent for their model. I remember being fascinated to read that the Big Mac and Ronald McDonald both came from local franchise restaurants, not corporate HQ. It's just a frustrating position to take. It feels short sighted.
A really cool fried who suddenly shows up for lunch in a suit, then eventually stops calling you. Your mom reads about them in a magazine and excitedly tells you what they're up to for a few years, then you stop hearing about them.
For example, most taxi cab regulations were passed in an era where the public had extremely unsafe and unclear transportation in an unfettered race to the bottom, (were being extorted by drivers, unsafe cars and unlicensed drivers, no insurance, etc etc). So in many municipalities regulations after much debate were passed to address these concerns that the market seemed unable to correct.
Now after enough time has passed, are the usages by taxi companies of those regulations to insure their market dominance in your view acting rationally or in an abusive manner?
http://www.nyc.gov/html/media/totweb/taxioftomorrow_history_...
Not really. They led people on, over the years, into building on their API. People spent a lot of time and money building Twitter clients. Then they pulled the rug out. Why would you build anything using an API that could get arbitrarily locked down in the future?
Yes, I'm serious.
And you build with proprietary APIs because that's where the users are. You can make a StatusNet client with no worries, but nobody will care.
This worldview seems to come up most in relation to free services, so maybe it's a belief that freely consumable services via the Web or mobile give should mean a freedom to consume the same data via an API.
I feel as a user as though I should be allowed to automate my use of Internet services. I should be able to use improved clients for any service as and when I like, to get improved user experience, and to integrate them with other services.
I can imagine a law that allows this. Entirely to encourage innovation and competition.
Remember - it's the early days of the web. It took about a century after the printing press before the consequent law changes (such as invention of copyright) settled down.
I expect it to take a century on the Internet as well. Everyone should plan for the future assuming our laws from previous centuries will be found by society to be unsuitable, and will change.
Do you think by going to a physician and having a checkup that the hospital or doctor's network should now have the right to sell the fact that you have some skin condition to Johnson & Johnson so they can target you with advertising?
I do not. I feel a physician and twitter have a legal responsibility to insure my data is secured by them and also that I have the right to take my data and and provide it to a competitor.
Twitter and my physician are a little different in that Twitter should be able to tell me the consumer that I can not use both their service and another, whereas a physician is obligation bound to treat me. Twitter is refusing to engage and be honest with its users however and instead is smashing competition in a similar fashion that Craigslist is not being honest with its users.
I have been told my view is un-American and that is I guess proving in practice to be true. Americans seem more than happy to bargain away their information for a few pieces of candy.
[1]: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/drugmakers-mine-data-fo...
What the drug companies are purchasing is anonymized; they have the data about patient X, but they have n idea who that person is. They are literally purchasing only the chance to pass along a request through your doctors to see if you'd be interested in participating in a study if you meet some criteria.
With the healthcare situation in America right now, I could imagine a lot of people would gladly trade that for a 10% cost reduction....
And any given person may write their own client, and use one single token for their twitter account.
I will add that, if the developer had made five dollars on each sale, he or she would now have a half million dollars, but I'm assuming they didn't, as the story is pitched as a tragedy rather than a triumph.
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So I imagine those people who were doing the apologizing are surprised. And as most of the rest of us thought, Twitter has withdrawn from being a platform and is just a business now. Just like any other business, don't bother doing anything with them unless you draw it up in a contract in advance. The independent 3rd party ecosystem for Twitter is dead. But the good news is that the opportunity for a startup that wants to be a true platform in this space is riper than it has been for a while.
> It does not appear that your service addresses an area that our current or future products do not already serve.
How can your future product already serve an area?
Developers are pissed off at Twitter for two main reasons:
1) Developers helped build Twitter as it exists today. With their hard work, sleepless nights and toil, they created the ecosystem that allowed Twitter to grow into the giant they are today. Now that Twitter is big, they are saying thank you by more or less shutting down their API for any serious Twitter integrations.
2) Twitter said, "we'll work with you" regarding API limits, but they didn't mean it. People that built things in good faith are now realizing that Twitter didn't act as such. If you put a lot of effort into building an app that utilizes Twitter's API, you'd be rightly pissed about this too.
I agree that it may have taken a long time for "the obvious" to set in with regards to Twitter not caring about their 3rd party developer ecosystem. Hopefully, as the OP points out, its pretty obvious you'd be a fool to build anything on Twitter anymore.
There were warnings about the fate of sharecroppers well before Twitter existed: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
Quote: "It’s a lousy position to be in, because you’re never going to make much, and if the land’s owner finds something better to do with the land, you’re history."
I'm sure Twitter knows how to block crawlers, especially ones that they're actually aware of.
Since the client runs on the user's machine, performance isn't really an issue, either. (Trying to do it for all users on a server is a different story.)
APIs are indeed "all the rage" because they're easier and don't change as much. But when given no other option... You do what you have to.
Not as straightforward as an API to be sure, but not impossible by a long shot.
A business? Probably too high risk. A nice FOSS client, though? Why not?
I wonder if this trend between FB, Twitter, etc. is going to ruin the ability for new companies and new platforms to attract free development by third parties?
The challenge is to determine, in advance, if the platform you are writing for will maintain some reasonable level of access to the API, both now, and in the future.
The question you have to ask yourself is how much leverage the third-party has over you if they decided they want to screw you over. Even still, you may want to write for that platform if the $$$ is there. Look at iOS platform - Apple totally owns you. Or, even better, look at the PS3/Wii/XBox platforms - the owners of those APIs have even more control over what you can do - but still very profitable platforms to develop for.
At the end of the day, a judgement call has to be made. No easy rules.
This is evidence for an unfortunate confusion about the usage of the term "API". There is a world of difference between a third-party library and a third-party service, each of which can be said to have an API. There are plenty of pieces of software which rely on one kind of API but not the other.
It is entirely possible to write software that doesn't rely on a third-party service. If that's the point you're trying to make then great! You see the thing is about relying on third-party services is that a great amount of trust must exist between the application and the service. It's a good way to go, but when there's no actual money moving between the app and the service, everyone has reason to be a little concerned.
A better strategy is to trust somebody (/an API) until they give you good reasons not to. Admittedly, twitter seems to have broken that trust. I personally would't use them as a platform, unless the benefits clearly outweigh the risks of them haphazardly cutting me off.
If you want Twitter-that-was, ADN is your best bet at this point.
How's that working out for Facebook?
But I suppose they'd just wind up getting sued.
What TOS does that violate? What if the user manually creates a token and inputs it? Could Twitter detect this even happening?
You answered your own question. People seem to be under the impression that just because something is accessible with a web browser it no longer falls under copyright and you can use it how you want. This has never been true. Any web site can make a terms of use (and most do) that prohibit you scraping their data.
It reminds me of the craigslist haters, and my response to them. I don't hate craigslist for stopping third parties from using their data because, frankly, it hurts their brand if "druggycriminalroommates.com" starts syndicating their apartment ads.
That said, don't think that I'm some sort of right-wing capitalist fascist. No, I don't think everything should be privately owned and controlled. There are some things that should remain public: internet infrastructure being one of them. My personal belief is that the only real egalitarian, open system is one that relies on that infrastructure, and ONLY on that infrastructure. This vision requires that people either a) run their own servers, or b) pay money to someone else to run servers (or parts of servers). (Other possibilities for payment exist, of course, such as bartering information for service, etc.)
I mean, twitter is free to control, the OP is free to complain about that control, but the solution presented (don't develop anything for twitter) is ridiculous and immature.
I'm pretty sure that I would, at that point, not be keen on developing anything that used that API, even if it complied with the new rules, because the company has at that point demonstrated that they will knife me in the back if they think it's going to further their own business goals. How is that reaction ridiculous and immature on my part?
Actually my message is this: build for the open web, and only the open web! There is a lot of room in that space. Personally, I think that Twitter will go bye bye and Facebook is going to get eroded by it. But that's my personal belief.
I like the open web you allude to. However, bills gotta get paid.
The open web is not at all anathema to making money! You say, "I like the open web you allude to. However, bills gotta get paid" but would you have also said, about interstate highways, "I like the highway system you allude to, but bills gotta be paid"? No, of course not. Highways enable gobs and gobs of business to be done. Twitter and facebook have built slightly more usable highways alongside the public ones, called them free, and people have gone there in droves. But once the true cost becomes realized, I think people will go back to the public highways - especially when this means that can go anywhere they want, however they want. Twitter is limiting clients, FB is limiting reach. Both companies are merely very expensive usability innovators on how users like to interact with the public web, in my opinion.
I am curious - where are the "public highway" equivalents of Twitter or Facebook? Who owns the infrastructure all this data is passed through? It's definitely not publicly owned. In my opinion, your analogy is mismatched.
Free physical access is provided in the US by public libraries. De facto free access is provided by a wide range of retail businesses, such as coffee shops.
With your own device connected to the internet you will have a NAT'd IP address from which you can request anything you want. Unfortunately, until IPv6 becomes commonplace, one has to jump through hoops to expose the device - the most common being some form of dynamic DNS.
At the coffee shop the packets that your computer sends are travelling around the world on de facto public infrastructure. It's true that a bad actor can shut down routes, but the internet is rather cleverly designed to treat a shutdown or reduction as "damage" and simply use a different route.
What happened to innovation? All I see these days is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. Hell even the memes these days are derived from other memes.
I thought we got over the "no value in UIs" bias when Apple made more money than some small countries.
>then sell it as your own
1) Tweetro doesn't say "look at this great real-time messaging service we made!" They built a UI. That's their value proposition.
2) Less importantly, Tweetro is free.
>All I see these days is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative.
How is that uniquely "these days"?
It would be refreshingly honest and for some people/clients it could work, plus it could earn them some of the needed cash.
Getting money from teeny little twitter apps is not the sort of plan they are going to make that money back with. Imagine if they charged a buck per username per year.
This would probably be enough money to put tweetro out of business (say 100k dollar per year), but it would not come close to the amount of money they need to make.
Even if something makes you good money, often you have to scrap it if it isn't or even endangers your core product.
But it doesn't make sense to do that, and they don't want to anyway.
It would probably be a nightmare to implement well.
A pity.
Very good summary by Marco. It's really annoying when these companies have secret policies that have to be discovered rather than are clearly stated. It just wastes people's time to try to discover the policy, having to do costly time consuming experiments to find out what the policy is as if this was an unknown branch of particle physics.
http://bijansabet.com/post/35849228202/the-first-photo-the-t...
Found via
http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/november/howTechCompanies...
Seems a sensible position to me (old guy, non-coder and won't use twitter or fb).
This is just shitty all around. Sometimes I wish I could buy 1,000 twitter tokens for some price and use it in some "core-feature" 3rd party app because twitter sucks at implementing the very core features.
And they may convince others to join App.net. Granted that many people will avoid App.net just because you have to pay for it and common internet guy will never realize what Twitter is doing. Still, if even top 10-20% of people who I follow go to App.net, I will follow!
Personally, I'm sick of being sold to. Ad-supported is not the only business model in town and I'm not sure when using an ad-supported service over a paid one became a virtue. If this makes me "rich", ok.
App.net is just proof that at least a few people agree with me.
I do think it's an exaggeration to say that app.net caters to the rich, but I can guarantee you that the demographics skew much more upper class, between being an app that is charged for and a service that mostly has interested hackers (who, nowadays, tend to be an affluent bunch, for better or worse).
Edit: Also, the value of a service like TV is something determined by the individual end-user. I don't think TV is more valuable than Twitter for everyone.
It sucks that Twitter is blocking cool development like this, but they've managed to become "a place where people are" (which is no easy task) and it's a mistake to underestimate that value.
Although, it still kills the advertising cash cow.
I'm pretty sure developers would agree to something like this and Twitter could get some extra money that they're not getting right now.
I participate in these services, but I know full well whatever I post is market research.
I see the need/desire for hackers to make things useful and unique in a way that they envision things but you will never hear me apologize for my remarks on this subject. If you are building your business or product depending on someone else's and are not a form of contractual partner you can be kicked in the ass down the line and there's no accountability to you they owe.
Late arrivals like identi.ca might not be as polished, but they offer a similar product, with open APIs. Being based on open and federated standards like status.net, it's extremely unlikely that identi.ca will ever get the ego trip twitter got, and in fact is much more likely that it will be more open over time, and more useful even if other competition arises. What it doesn't have, and what we (consumers as well as devs) can help with, is by heading over there and giving them users and status and content.
At least, for now. Twitter has shown they are willing to be hostile towards their developers. Even if I fit in the "don't take their eyeballs" category, I wouldn't build on their platform because I don't trust them.
If you're working against Twitters interest already then why not go for broke?
wat?
Why do you need another client? Just go to the People Hub and click What's new. Need to reply or retweet? The buttons are right below the message. Need to see mentions or replies? Click Notifications.
For instance, I'm thinking about this for my integrations -- that's a token Twitter will never ban or throttle.
Businesses that rely on twitter will have a contractual relationship with twitter , meaning less uncertainty ,less competition ( since you'll have to pay upfront to access twitter's data , less clients ).
That's the solution that makes sense , instead of this half baked situation twitter api developers are in.