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Comment by jbwyme | Hacker News Reader

It strikes me a little odd that twitter doesn't want to have a larger hand in their data distribution. Having some one else handle it seems like something a non-tech company would do. Scaling and automating the distribution to subscribers doesn't strike me as a problem twitter would have a hard time solving and I hardly doubt they need any one else to sell it for them from a marketing standpoint. What, from a business perspective, do you suppose is driving their decision to only work with three companies?

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Are you sure that Twitter is a tech company?

These days, Twitter seems to be a "let's piss everyone off, we're big enough that they can't do anything about it" company.

I've been a member since 01/2007 and have been developing against their API for nearly as long (though for what I imagine are rather obvious reasons, I haven't been near it recently). I've seen more fail whales than I could possibly count. I've sent 5000 tweets over the last nearly six years. I'm even listed as a contributor in the original O'Reilly book on Twitter API development.

I've seen it slowly become less and less useful and usable. I've watched them make their developers and contributing users hate them as they struggled to find a business model (who else remembers the #dickbar ?). I'm now watching them destroy their ecosystem as they try to execute on their chosen business model.

Twitter, I am disappoint.

For what Twitter is today, I'm sure they are. They are essentially the world's largest chat room except every participant gets to curate their own experience (plus it's all indexed). Maybe their revenue stream won't be directly a tech product but will certainly be the result of one.

What do you mean by "won't be directly"? It seems like you're implying they're not making money today, which they most certainly are. They do have a revenue stream. Several, really, between promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and the firehose.

Surely Twitter is a content company enabled by tech? Their technology is easily replicated, the thing they have of value is the content.

Increasingly I think they're no more a tech company than say, Warner Brothers. Warners rely completely on tech for creating and distributing content but it's not ultimately what they produce which is of interest and / or value. Ditto Twitter.

Last I heard, the firehose is something like 30MB/s of data. Maybe maintaining a pipe like that to a large number of subscribers is just not what Twitter wants to spend its time or money on.

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