Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore
thetwitcleaner.com
thetwitcleaner.com
The dumbest thing about this is that monetizing Twitter is trivial, without changing anything else. Just put occassional and obvious ads in our streams, and charge us to upgrade to see an ad-free steam.
On the other hand, that is the status quo of the web (cf. AdBlock) and it mostly works.
I am also of the opinion that a vary cheap add blocking option say 1$/month would prevent most people from jumping though many hoops for add-block software.
I think the better argument is that most people don't know/care for ad-blocking software. I think AdBlock and its alternatives are prevalent in the tech community, but we're just a small part of total users.
I'd be willing wager that those 30 seconds of barrier would deter like 70-80% of the computer using population. Very few people as a whole know or are comfortable with browser extensions.
I recall Bonzi Buddy by name, but I know there were lots of others ... redirects for ecommerce affiliate fees and other obnoxious rent seeking.
I wonder if you could encourage the people who hate ads but would happily take a legitimate option by detecting ad blockers and instead of haranguing them for it, put up a polite advert for how to legitimise their ad free usage? (thinking in general, not just for twitter)
Perhaps they can charge for certain items that can be considered premium, such as verified accounts. I still doubt there'll be a couple million of users willing to pay though.
Regardless, as a developer it sucks to see companies take away fun tools, but as an entrepreneur I like seeing them at least try and execute an actual business plan.
But was the awesomeness before?
It's hard to see $9 billion worth in these ideas, but that's only if we think in the short term.
Twitter could be genuinely worth that in 5 or 10 years, but only if it focussed on customers, and that's only going to happen if the founders vision trumps the very short term investor greed.
Twitter really from a tech prospective is a protocol and it seemed that Twitter as a business was in line with what they were providing. Twitter.com acted as the centralized hub and the developers were invited to build upon and enrich the Twitter protocol. The goal was the more tweets and users the better no matter where they were coming from.
Then they realized they need to start making money.
It seems that from the business folks the reaction has been to strong arm users back to using Twitter controlled products with the assumption that they can start to serve ads. I don't blame them necessarily in that this is the standard business model for a social network but I think it will fail specifically for Twitter. In my opinion advertising will cannabalize their business - they should be looking to sell analytics and insights - thats where their value is. Yes its harder, less proven but they are just destroying themselves with their current strategy. Im sure nobody wants to see ads on Twitter and I wouldn't be surprised if nobody really wants to serve ads in that Twitter is exceptionally noisy and the functionality is very streamlined. On the other hand the value of real-time trends or the licensing to do so is exceptionally valuable to just about every company. Perhaps its not as easy of a business model as ads but at least its seemingly more scalable with their ecosystem.
Maybe there is no serious money on that type of business model. Remember, most employees, investors and execs are trying to dump Twitter to investors, who cares what happens 2-3 years from now? The revenue needs to be shown now, ideally before advertisers get to see any hard stats on effectiveness.
Facebook has been adding more ads, Google is virtually all ads so why not Twitter. Facebook will tire people with ads, Twitter too, Google will lose their reputation little by little considering that fairness is the core of it's business. But many will have cashed out and others will hold the bag
This seems incredibly obvious to me, and is what I meant elsewhere in the thread where I mentioned knowing what everyone in the world is thinking right now.
Yes, it is hard. But they've got the profile and the money to round up the talent for it.
Making money from ads is cute and all, but there's a whole other level they could be working on.
I just hope that they'll stick to this announcement, as I'm building my hashtagify.me based on that...
It seems to me that the lower left quadrant is worth an incredible amount of money, but maybe I'm just wrong. It's been known ot happen.
The VC mantra is: 'We acquire a large amount of users for free our services. Someone (the buyer) will monetize them later'. Users are the currency of internet startups.
-- Charge celebrities and companies for the capability of having huge numbers of followers. Remember Ashton Kutcher's race to be the first twitter user with 1 million followers? Yeah. Having that many followers is valuable to the person with the followers, and caused actual strain on twitter's infrastructure. Why didn't they charge money for that?
-- Charge third party developers for increased API capacity. It's obvious that this is a pain point. Why not just provide the option to pay to remove this pain point? Maybe they are planning to? who knows
-- Charge users for special account abilities- like, perhaps, many of the features offered by tweet deck.
And yet we have them pursuing this artificial advertising strategy. sigh.
I can only think that the strategy they are pursuing is that they see twitter as a passive medium for celebrities to transmit messages to their fans. Like it's a text based TV, that they can run ads next to. Perhaps they have the user demographics to back this up. Us weirdo geeks that use it as a a many-to-many communications medium are the vast minority.
You can't. Servies like these grow because of celebrities and their fans. Taxing the celebs will stop their own growth. Also, there are lots of would-be celebs who don't make a lot of money and are trying to use twitter to get the word out there.
> Charge third party developers for increased API capacity.
For the same reason as above, you can't. A lot of people come on facebook and stay there because of apps, charging devs for API access will kill innovation. Also, if something is popular and growing, taxing it will be bad for both the users and the dev if the dev can't pay. Also keep in mind that most popular apps may not have a monetization strategy yet.
> Charge users for special account abilities- like, perhaps, many of the features offered by tweet deck.
This is a good approach and is the LinkedIn model. I'm sure they're thinking of doing this with talk of 'lightweight analytics' etc so long as they don't make the paid users too powerful and disenfranchise existing users.
I would keep the API free and open, sure charge for the larger feeds and enforce 3rd parties to show sponsored tweets where appropriate.
The celebrities in this case, are using twitter as an ADVERTISING platform. you said it yourself- would-be celebrities are trying to use twitter to "get the word out". is this now not an opportunity worth paying for? Would the fans, noticing they are unable to follow Ashton, blame twitter, for charging a reasonable price for that huge megaphone, or Ashton, for being unwilling to pay for this enormously powerful broadcast medium? I don't think, in this case, limiting growth is a serious issue.
> for the same reason as above, you can't. A lot of people come on facebook and stay there because of apps, charging devs for API access will kill innovation. Also, if something is popular and growing, taxing it will be bad for both the users and the dev if the dev can't pay. Also keep in mind that most popular apps may not have a monetization strategy yet.
Apple charges $99 for an SDK. straight up flat fee, annual charge. Are you saying this has seriously harmed innovation for iOS?
What I'm proposing isn't even that. It's charging for say, having an app that has more than 10,000 simultaneous users. If you are charging money for this app (and many twitter clients do), is asking for a fee really as harmful as you claim? I don't think so.
> For the same reason as above, you can't.
Twitter is already charging developers $infinity for > 100k API tokens; lowering that to $1/per token or something isn't going to harm the app ecosystem.
They might have made money via subscription route but they will make more money via ads.
No thanks.
sigh
Yeah, you're both right. I'll move the images local. Not intending to leach. Just trying to lighten up an otherwise kinda depressing post. Seeing four years of work come crashing down.
As pg says, running a startup is like being repeatedly hit in the face.
Be ready to be surprised, the next link to a meme you click could be a gore-fest.
Some of us are still on shared servers or have limited bandwidth, or just care on principle.
When the leechers are popular forums it can be a definite tax.
Making a local thumbnail isn't that difficult, likely in whatever language you happen to use.
They always end up lashing out at the wrong people - in this case smart developers who are giving them free promotion and creating value for their users.
It's sad because Twitter had by far the best platform to build innovative software off of, but now I wouldn't touch Twitter's API with a 10 foot pole. There's too much risk that I'll spend lots of time putting something together and then getting shut down.
The worst part about it is that spammers still easily use the Twitter API but legitimate software gets rate limited or shut down. It's really sad given the potential that Twitter had.
Of course, they own the field, so they could change the rules at any time, thus (once again) killing the project.
From a technical basis, 90% of the effort was building a robust system atop Twitter's. The actual core behavioural categorisation engine was relatively trivial.
Ie, it would require a major rebuild, without lessening the risks at all.
Initially, growth is the most important part of a social network, so it makes sense to prioritize usability. Over time, pressures towards monetization mount (either internally or externally, among spammers). Monetization tends to degrade the user experience, creating opportunities for new entrants.
Network effects can keep you going, but these aren't Ma Bell's network effects. Users can install competing social apps next to each other using almost no time and less money. They get to keep the more established network as a fallback, then spend most of their time using the one with better features or more "exclusivity." Even if this doesn't lubricate transitions enough for established users, network effects are basically nonexistent among new cohorts (read: the young, emerging international markets).
If this is correct, it would explain why no one under 20 actually uses Facebook (or email, for the matter), and why every move from Twitter smacks of desperation.
So, I don't know, all hail snapchat? (At least until something displaces that in five years...)
At one point I thought there mission was to "Know what everyone in the world is thinking right now".
Obviously useful, obviously valuable.
Instead....well, I don't really know where they're going, and I don't think they do either.
I've moved to another native client, but as a user who likes to see multiple avenues for engineers to subsist (i.e. not just working for bigco), it's saddening to see.
Twitter is not important enough for me to have to run a separate application for it.
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/rate-limiting
Look for these headers:
X-FeatureRateLimit-Limit
X-FeatureRateLimit-Remaining
X-FeatureRateLimit-Reset
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/application/rate_li...
The logo was created by Simon Oxley. It's misleading because while Oxley is a Twitter user, he didn't create it for Twitter: he created as stock imagery, and Twitter purchased the rights to use the image via iStockphoto: http://www.wired.com/business/2009/03/twitter-designe/
It gets into false territory because subsequent versions of the logo were developed by designers either Twitter employed or contracted with.
Even if you're talking about the "T" logo variant, it's also not true: the "T" logo was simply the "T" from Twitter's original wordmark, which was simply the Pico Alphabet font designed in 2001 by a Japanese design firm, Maniacker's Design: http://www2.wind.ne.jp/maniackers/pico.html
To go for functionality, the hashtag and retweet were developed by users not Twitter.
Moreover, it's misleading to claim the bird logo was created by third-party Twitter users (or devs): the fact that Simon Oxley has an account on Twitter played no part in the acquisition of the rights to use his work. They purchased the rights to use stock imagery.
That is to say, its association with Twitter is due to Twitter buying the rights to the image and using it in their branding, not due to Oxley's involvement in the Twitter community or his offering it up as a community take on Twitter branding (which he did not). It's not in the same category as borrowing from or being inspired by the Twitter community as was the case with hashtags and retweets.
The subsequent logos were created by internal Twitter designers or contractors. While I'm sure they are Twitter users, they are definitely not third party Twitter users and their usage of Twitter is incidental to their design work.
We are returning back to the 90s where API access came from BD deals and the rest of us did dirty parsing to make things work.
For a while we got the illusion those days may be gone. And why not, it sure felt like that. But now we are getting to a stage it's almost worse for services to have public or free APIs at all.
I use Twitter to talk to some of my friends, share things I think are cool links, follow a few people whose work I admire, and occasionally tweet links to my own work. I don't follow back everyone who follows me; I basically regard Twitter as a sort of IRC channel where I get to choose who's in it.
How do people who actually need this kind of tool use Twitter?
You can build a Twitter account with real followers pretty quickly that way.
I'm in my 30s so I don't feel that "get off my lawn" old, but I just never "got it" I guess. Any tech person I want to follow normally has a blog because you are limited to the character limit.
I wish twitter had built in filters, what drove me away was all the pictures, the "lolz", and food/drink shots in exchange for a few tech links that aren't on the persons blog and if I were not following them I might not have known.
Twitter feels like reddit to me while RSS is akin to HN. HN is super focused, and while some funny OT stories make it to the front page, for the most part it is solid tech news. reddit you get _everything_
If twitter could somehow provide "channels" or something like professional/personal I'd really see the value. Not everyone is going to hashtag their tech only stuff or personal only stuff
Am I doing it wrong?
Whoever reverts all titles changed this one from the useful and descriptive title I submitted it with.
This was the original:
> TwitCleaner shutting down due to API changes
Comparing Twitter to RSS is definitely way off as RSS has really nothing to do with social, and Twitter has everything to do with social. HN/Reddit, by comparison, are almost exactly the same thing with just different community standards.
Twitter is really about a streamlined and open conversation. It's a more stripped-down social experience compared to Facebook or Tumblr or whatever other social networks came before, but yet it captures the essence of online interaction in an elegantly minimalist fashion. I think this leads some people to find it utterly vapid because online interaction is simply not the same as in-person, and Twitter exacerbates these characteristics by lowering the time and location requirements down to near zero, so you can participate anywhere, anytime, on any device without ever having to take more than a minute because you're limited to 140 characters anyway. There is definitely a purity and beauty to it, but it always gives me the sense that I'm wasting my time.
> HN is super focused, and while some funny OT stories
> make it to the front page, for the most part it is solid
> tech news.
They could easily have been embedded direct, for what little value they offer. As it stands, it's just frustrating and really poor writing.
The post was intended to be stand alone commentary Not a bulletproof thesis.
All I'm saying is my opinions etc after a long stressful week.
Ignore the links, they're just there to lighten the story.
but personally, I recommend against fart jokes during a eulogy.
(death doesn't have to be a morbid depressing thing, despite the tendency in the west to view it as such)
Was it making you money?
No. Off hand, it'd require batching the users into groups of 100 and using an API call (/users/lookup) for each group. That gives you a user object each (which you don't care about), but also the latest tweet.
The limit is 180/15 mins, ie a max of 18k in any 15 minute window.
That beats my first naive attempt, which was an API call (/statuses/user_timeline/<id>.json?count=1) per user.
Hmm, I just noticed there was also (now deprecated) GET statuses/friends which did what I want. It is deprecated in favour of your suggestion.
What we/others say is a distant second. Right now they need to show growing revenues and that's it.
Either way it's sad to see this service go. The guy seems nice and provided a good service, but clearly he's not going to spend a bunch of his own time and money if it's not rewarding anymore.