I think that horse may have bolted Jack. I am not sure a developer who had the rug pulled from under them once will take the risk of investing their time in the Twitter API again. Fool me once etc...
I think the picture in the article sums it up perfectly. It would be really hard to ever trust them again unless they were willing to put a contract in place with some sort of financial penalty to them. And even then I'm not sure I would trust them.
Nothing like an "apology" that doesn't apologize for the real wrongdoing. How I love corporate speak.
"Our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable. We want to come to you today and apologize for the confusion."
Yeah it was the "confusion" that was wrong. Nothing like apologizing but not admitting fault either. He's basically saying "we did the right thing, we just didn't communicate it clearly."
You're absolutely right. they should have said "We apologize for the kind of relationship we developed with IT businesses building on top of Twitter". Because this apology is basically "We apologize if we hurt someone but we're not going to change our policies, merely fire the guy in charge".
Why does it seem it's only Twitter with this problem? (or at least the most frequent and public).
Twitter "hoses" developers all the time who were making money based on apps supporting Twitter. They "hose" the developer because Twitter would rather make that money instead of allowing others to, yet they then fail to capitalize on the vacuum they just created.
Over time, it's made Twitter a seemingly very unattractive platform to try to dev against. Twitter doesn't make much in terms of earnings on their own, it seems it would be in their best interest to allow an ecosystem around their platform.
Facebook has also done this repeatedly, but most of their issues aren't arbitrary business decisions. They just make breaking changes to production APIs all the time.
> but most of their issues aren't arbitrary business decisions.
Happens all the time. App.net was original an "app store" for facebook but they decided to make a competitor called App Center or something and told App.net they could either be acquired or shut down.
> Facebook has also done this repeatedly ... They just make breaking changes to production APIs all the time.
They do, but that doesn't slam the door shut on a developer/business purely for the sake of slamming the door shut on a developer/business.
From what I've seen, Facebook encourages API usage. Twitter encourages it until you make money, then they shut you down - often stating they're building a similar app/service and you'd be competing with them -- only then to never launch said app/service.
Twitter as a platform isn't worth much (as evidenced by year after year of not turning profits). The value in Twitter is the data - but they are locking it away.
Why not go the Google route and charge for API usage over a certain threshold. Twitter could stop caring what users do with the data, and make money as their ecosystem grows and becomes more successful.
It seems like the point of a API is to let third-party developers assume the risk of experimenting with new services. Then Twitter can acquire or copy the successful services.
> Then Twitter can acquire or copy the successful services.
I think this is what makes people so hostile towards Twitter.
Twitter neither clones successful services nor continues to run those they acquire. Instead they either shut them down, or acquire then shut them down - meanwhile completely missing opportunity after opportunity to capitalize on their massive ocean of data.
It seems, based on history, Twitter is not interested in running many services around the Twitter platform/API/data. Instead they really just want to be "Twitter".
I say, let them do what they do best - acquire data and build great API's. Let 3rd parties build Twitter's userbase and data, but charge them for access to the API. It's a simple monetization plan.
You can currently pay for GNIP if you want access to the API beyond what Twitter will give you for free. I have no idea if that will suffer the same issues of being cut off once you get popular enough, nor do I know how much it would cost, but it seems like they're at least vaguely headed in that direction.
It is true that FB routinely breaks the APIs. It is also true that they will kill your app if it gets too big and they don't like it. It has happened to me 2x, and I have seen it happen to other apps as well.
Right on. It's the failure to build in the vacuum that is most upsetting to me. There is so much value in Twitter users' content that could be used in new and interesting ways. However, the company both fails to innovate on that front and prohibits its community from innovating. It's standing squarely in the way of progress :(
Twitter only has this problem because Twitter's earliest users were developers, who's development on top of Twitter also happened to be a significant part of why the company grew in the early days. So the perception is largely that they've screwed over the very people who helped them grow. Thus the frequent public outcry from those developers while Twitter reaps the rewards.
On the other hand, Facebook's earliest users were just college kids snapping pics of each other.
I think what Alupis was trying to say is that when Twitter screws over developers, they aren't actually successful at reaping the rewards. Twitter has basically been saying to developers, "if we can't make money off of the platform, no one can!"
Because the other big platforms don't have as good APIs, and don't monetize them? FB or Tumblr don't t make money selling data streams like Twitter. Twitter's API is incredibly complete and attractive.
It's even more unfortunate because of all the social media platforms, I think Twitter is the most naturally appealing for third-party development. It's very data driven, there is a good API, the data model and flow is clear, it's almost begging to be parsed and extended. If they are ever going to get anywhere, they really need to embrace this and empower developers to create cool stuff in the Twitter ecosystem.
Yeah that came off very poorly and incredibly insincere. He can't promise immediate change but feels they will, in time? Fuck that. He could immediately undo the limitations if he wanted.
"Thank you for holding. You call is very important to us."
I was in the audience for the keynote, the clear message was that twitter was confused about what their relationship to developers should be, and they're looking to fix that.
Okay - I don't work for Twitter, I only care about twitter inasmuch as they're a big data source for my company. So I don't speak for Twitter.
That being said, this event is a whole event focused around Twitter developers, and this was seriously just a 9 minute talk by the CEO about a general vision of Twitter, with a 60 second part of it about the "we screwed up" piece. I don't think it's an appropriate situation for a self-flagellation and introspection.
Since then they've gone through and talked about new APIs, new toolkits, new data sources, all for developers.
I get that they still want to control their platform and that is objectionable to some folks, but it's hard to argue that they're not doing anything with developers.
If I want to drive my car on a highway and the state department says "really sorry there's so many potholes, we were confused about how we communicated to how you should drive on them", I'm still sitting here wondering whether I should continue to drive on that road for my business or not. Now if they said "we screwed up, we're sorry. going forward we have a 5 point plan to help make sure you can drive on that road" I would feel much better about continuing to use that road for my business.
The analogy is beyond tortured at this point, but I would say the way I see this is that the state department laid down a highway, and said, "Have at it!", and people built all kinds of different cars - kit cars, motorcycles, high performance vehicles.
Then, a few years later, the state department says, "Oh shit, nevermind", and pulls everyone's car registration except for the state department manufactured cars. Chaos reigns. People are angry.
A couple of years later, there's a lot of hard feelings, but the state department has changed their tune a little bit. You still have to use the state department cars for your personal vehicles, but you can mod them a little bit, or you can attach trailers to them, or you can pay extra to drive bigger cars, or a lot more to drive 18 wheelers. They make money from these things, and commit to those options with contracts and guidance about what is allowed and what isn't allowed.
At that point the state department says, "Geez, we're real sorry that we didn't think about what we were doing before". They've already demonstrated that they walked back on their earlier policy, and they have set clear guidelines and boundaries about what they do and don't allow.
I realize you still might be mad if you don't want to drive your government-issued car on the road, and you're entitled to that feeling, but what more do you expect the state department to do in terms of apologizing?
It really seems like this is where you should have some sort of concrete contract/agreement to reassure developers. Without that, I can't see how anyone could trust them.
i got a great business, people give me 75 cents i give them a dollar, it scales infinitely, and has the potential for absolutely titanic revenue, interested in investing?
They do make a damn good lunch though. They should pivot to a series of restaurants where you can only message positive reviews regarding the amazing food you just ate while surrounded by a lot of hot, young tech workers.
Let the public access the THREE freaking floors of food in their HQ where each employee is required to act as a server (no pun) to customers for an hour or so a day.
The menu is a stream you follow, and you reply with "@table10 orders the tataki, chicken and veggies" and the SRE (service restaurant enabler) delivers the food while describing Flock...
The single most important thing that Twitter can do to encourage developers to build on their platform is to completely and unambiguously align interests. If a developer is successful, Twitter should be successful, and vice versa. This is infinitely more reliable than any promise and is how all successful application platforms operate.
Exactly. The problem isn’t that we can’t believe Dorsey’s intentions, it’s that Dorsey’s intentions don’t necessarily create the reality of Twitter’s future. Whether it’s Twitter or Facebook (or others), these companies will keep changing their product and business and thus consumers of their API will always be on quicksand.
That would be solid business sense. If developers are successful on Twitter's platform, they wouldn't easily leave for the next shiny thing. Customers also would benefit, as products won't disappear overnight because twitter cut off access. It is a win-win for everyone.
But how do developers being successful on Twitter's platform translate to Twitter making money? Developers aren't really willing to pay for access to Twitter, and I don't think many of them want to show Twitter's ads, as that removes a way for them to make money by offering an ad free version, and makes offering their own ads that much less unpalatable.
>But how do developers being successful on Twitter's platform translate to Twitter making money?
Same way 3rd party developers helped originally grow twitter. A variety of twitter 3rd party tools drives user engagement with twitter. That data most likely has value that twitter simply hasn't figured out how to extract efficiently yet (slapping ads in the feed is an easy monetization strategy, not necessarily a good one).
That's the problem. If anybody finds a way to build a successful business on Twitter, their interests are by definition not aligned with Twitter's, because Twitter themselves have not yet figured out how to build a successful business on Twitter. Losing more of Twitter's money to make third parties successful is not a basis for an alignment of interests.
That is only true given the current state of Twitter's product and business model. I think it's a stretch to say that they can't make the necessary changes to align interests. In fact, I think they're dead in the water if they can't. And Jack knows that.
Twitter could have gone to a royalty basis for API access from fairly early on.
If they required that developers with more than 100 users agree to pay $1:user:year, or %10 percent of gross receipts, whichever is greater, then app developers would have to have some means of making money, and the flowback would be to twitter, while still allowing for experimental apps to continue being developed.
Twitter cut off their nose despite their face here. Or for that matter, twitter itself could charge end users $10-15/year for being able to access their own account via API (anything but twitter's own client), and limit to X queries per day/month (something a real user is unlikely to exceed).. that would help keep the spam bots at bay.
>If a developer is successful, Twitter should be successful, and vice versa.
They would still need to find a way to make money, which was exactly why Twitter started to limit the 3rd. party developers to begin with. They hoped that tighter control over their eco-system would help selling more ads.
What would developers build on top of Twitter that can make Twitter money? I don't question that you can build interesting and wonderful apps, using Twitter as infrastructure or as a data source, but that just burdens Twitter further. Either developers need to pay Twitter for access to their platform, or developers need to allow Twitter to push ads. Alternatively developers and Twitter can data-mine the crap out of their users and split the profit.
I just don't see what product Twitter could push that will cover their operational cost. Twitter is a publicly listed business, success is measured solely on profit.
So, you can pay Twitter for access, and people do just that. We pay quite a chunk of a money for a significant percentage of the global stream of Tweets, and we use that to do analytics and sell those analytics to customers.
Now, we also pull data from thousands of other providers, so it's not like we have all of our eggs in one basket, but we have a great business going where twitter is a significant percentage of the total volume of our data. Twitter also has certain advantages as a data source that many other providers don't.
Top of the list would be low-cost filtered API access. Much cheaper than the firehose, with commensurately less data (by keyword(s), location, etc. instead of the whole shebang.) The current pricing opacity and inability to just sign up online like you can with Parse (https://parse.com/plans) means far fewer people as customers. My understanding is that API deals are company-by-company.
Edit: I'll add that if relations get repaired now and then broken again, I don’t think they’ll be fixable a third time. They need to get this right, IMO.
I've been hearing this -- "Twitter is just not inventive enough, they know what everyone is doing in the world" and so on.
Yet billions of dollars later and nobody there realised it? I can't imagine people there are so stupid and that they'd come read HN, smack they hand on their heads and say "Oh, we never knew, thanks HN commenters for saving us. We'll make a great profit and share it with you!".
But not to miss out, and join HN armchair analysts group, I for one, don't believe Twitter is that useful or valuable. Does it know what my neighbors are thinking? My boss? My grandma? Me? No, because I am not on Twitter, they are not.
I see a lot of garbage on Twitter usually. Silly status lines "mmm, yummy green salad!" or "what is the meaning of life..". Developers would do something like "Compiling takes too long, we need a new compiler!". And so on. Then of course it is the quintessential platform for spats and misunderstandings. It is hard to express ideas in 140 character lines so everything feels short, mean and snippy and people get into lengthy back and forths that are mostly stupid and pointless.
Is it impossible to monitise what they do? No, but I think it is not as clear-cut as it may seem.
I think it depends on who you are following... I don't check or even try to keep up with twitter.. I tend to check recents a few times a week.. but every time I see at least something interesting... most of my follows are in tech though.. yeah, there's a lot of random stuff... but there's some gems in there too.
I'm actually more inclined to tweet when I find something interesting... partly because looking at my own history works better than browser bookmarks at this point.. and partly because someone else might also find it interesting.
Actually Twitter makes a lot of money. They just burn much more than they make. Iwonder is the cost of their ooperations can be slashed 2x without almost nohe of the users noticing.
Twitter and Facebook are 2 different products, the latter being a social network ,the former a "social network message bus" since relationships and streams are public by default.
Well Twitter should embrace that fact instead pulling the plug on successful Twitter based products and offer paid plans for business who want to build on top of twitter.
Apology not accepted. Twitter tipped their hand here a long time ago - once the network got strong enough, start locking things down so those crazy devs don't do anything cool or interesting that you can't monetize, nevermind if it makes the user experience many times better.
Translation: "We're too in the box to think outside of the box. So other developers please find a way to make Twitter popular again so we can steal that application[0], bar any other third-party from making anything related to that idea so we can be the sole monetizer of said application.
[0] Application not being an "app", but more of a new way to use twitter.
>You only get one chance to make a first impression.
Same problem they are facing with the massive number of users that tried Twitter and abandoned it. Much easier to acquire a new user than to re-acquire an old user that has already decided against.
Anyone burned by twitter will think twice about working on it again, however it is likely too valuable of a platform to not give ample consideration to.
I reckon twitter will merge with square and provide end-to-end advertising metrics for impressions --> clicks --> cart additions --> purchases. This will be valuable, and as much as I think twitter is silly, if they provide this they will do well.
Platform companies with stroes:
* Microsoft
* Google Play
* Apple
* [ empty ]
Super conflated and contrived appraisal here, but Twitter better post a strong offering in empty before facebook and they can't do that well without square and a platform or decentralized market. All this is to say, Twitter needs developers bad and to the extent they win them from Facebook and other platforms will be tied to the value they provide. I think that value will be provided by purchasing square in a merger of equals and building a dumb pipe platform, letting developers curate the content and providing stores.
We'll see what developer sentiment is, first few comments lead me to beleive it is not great.
I agree about the current state of developer sentiment. I think anyone who looks at a company like Microsoft will see that developer sentiment isn't static. Might take years for things to change but I commend them for taking the right first steps towards rectifying the situation.
The tough thing is that the calculation developers make is a mixed bag of components that involves not just trust, but fiscal opportunity. People's fortunes and livelihoods are tied to developing for a platform. In some ways, this ship may have sailed. Might be a situation where even if devs find a way to regain some trust, the actual perceived value of the commitment these days isn't as alluring.
The question is, what has fundamentally changed about Twitter's business model that has now re-aligned its incentives to better match those of the developer community to enable them to make this promise today?
Why would you bother to come back after being kicked in the teeth, to a platform that is now stagnating, showing little signs of growth and has no obvious revenue model for app developers?
This is the cart before the horse. They need to fix Twitter so that people want to develop for it again, not say "Hey, here's this downtrodden mess, come and make it better for us!"
If they had announced that developers can make twitter client apps and display foreign services (e.g. instagram) in the same stream with the tweets without limit to the number of end users, I would be interested. I just assume this is a statement to the shareholders and will have very little effect on developers.
Too little, too late. But thanks for the important lesson of not building something on Twitter's platform when the rug can be pulled out from under you. That lesson applies to other platforms too.
This seems like it's almost too small of a world view. When twitter pulled the rug out, it informed a shift in thinking, everywhere. Not just with twitter.
The wisdom became "Don't build your business on another one." and twitter was the primary example of why not. For twitter to turn around and say "Ok, we made some mistakes, and we want to develop that trust again." is misunderstanding what happened.
twitter changed the conventional wisdom, not just wisdom about twitter.
The wisdom became "Don't build your business on another one."
That wisdom is WAY older than twitter. It may have become a fashionable meme again because of Twitter, but platform risk has been around probably about as long as computing. Certainly the idea goes back at least as far as the infamous DOS/Lotus 1-2-3 dustup. Google "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" for example. Note that whether or not Microsoft actually tried to break Lotus 1-2-3 isn't the point. I'm just saying people have been aware of, and talking about, these kinds of risks for a LONG time.
Well, new generations often needs new lessons. I'm from the generation that contains the majority of potential developers of sexy Twitter-based hot unicorn Uber-for-Cloud-Based-Social-Gardening startups and I haven't ever heard any stories about DOS/Lotus 1-2-3. Fortunately, Twitter made it up for us.
"The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Startups rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory they are extinguished. Lotus were not the first. They did not create the Platform. They did not forge the APIs. They merely found them - the legacy of my kind." - Twitter CEO in my twisted imagination.
It's not just Twitter. Most popular APIs tend to regulate and constrain use as they grow popular. This has dissuaded developers, and certainly startups from building products on top of APIs. VCs do not like companies depending on third party APIs either, due to the fact that they may be arm twisted by the API service.
Twitter's attitude towards developers is potentially impacting the uptake of libraries like Fabric, despite having nothing to do with their API. What Twitter may have a shot at, as a result of this effort is to get usage of their libraries like Fabric on par standing ground with libraries and products like Parse from Facebook.
The recent Standford ETL talk by Jeff Seibert (Senior Director of Product at Twitter) provides some insight into the development of the Twitter API's/SDK (Fabric). Overall, I thought it was one of the better and more practical talks.
Oh, so another cycle starts. Here's a note I took back earlier, around the time of the original Twitter fiasco, pasted straight from my quotes file:
* Sovereign from Mass Effect on using someone else's technology
"Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays,
our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths
we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You
exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."
Strangely, it seems to describe recent (2012/2013) situation with
API of Twitter perfectly.
Twitter could avoid this sentiment by making a fiscally-binding statement:
"We have opened up our API, and have placed $5B in escrow with the Gates Foundation, who will return 70% of the investment income to Twitter. If we deny API access to developers before 2020, the Gates Foundation will keep the principal."
Someone sufficiently clever could make a similar, but perpetual, statement.
You could use equity, which would be really interesting, because the market would revalue Twitter based on the probability of them reneging and diluting the existing shares.
And this is exactly how it should be. If you want to build your business on the back of someone else who is doing the heavy lifting, then don't be surprised when they rear up and no longer let you ride.
I still don't understand why people feel they are entitled to perpetual API access.
Maybe Twitter should follow the lead that I do - those that license and use many of my APIs pay on a royalty model - they pay a certain percentage of all revenue that their platform generates. Period.
It's not about entitlement. It's about asking people not to be lazy. Twitter grew into what it is today BECAUSE of 3rd party developers. Their core revenue which is ads has its roots embedded in what other people invented like the hashtag, and the retweets. Their user engagement and growth was given birth to BY these same developers who created great experiences when Twitter didn't have the resources to do so.
And after that, Twitter felt like it's platform had been evolved by other people long enough and said "alright everyone, we don't want you anymore" and killed businesses overnight.
> And this is exactly how it should be. If you want to build your business on the back of someone else who is doing the heavy lifting,
In this case, it was a group of people who built twitter's business (and then their business) on top of the Twitter backbone. Put another way, Twitter wouldn't be what it is without the developers.
The side effect of all of this is that Twitter's innovation has since languished. They've settled into incremental changes such as the way you view hashtags of an event now. I get that that's not a trivial thing either, but their business model should have always been about increasing capabilities of Twitter's core based on what other developers made interesting (the retweet is an example of something like this done really well).
My first statement. It's about asking people to be not lazy. Twitter stepped in and thought "hmm we can't control our ad experience in a world like this so let's shut down the people who've built our business all these days"
That's lazy. That's the result of a bingo meeting that couldn't come to a conclusion on any alternative suggestion and instead opted to use a nuke.
If they really cared, they could have asked developers at the time. They had a great relationship then and they could have avoided this entire thing of asking developers for feedback now. They could have done that back then, and I'm sure people would have come up with great suggestions and compromises.
This is the fundamental change that you accept with using SAAS software - like twitter or so many other things nowadays. Whereas if you're running your company on something like office, you're guaranteed access to what you have in perpetuity. With SAAS software, the software can change, can be discontinued, can disappear without warning, can start spying on you, can ...
And the argument here is that once someone has a decent part of the market, they can't start eating the people that built the market for them ? Good luck with that one. Hell, it's Amazon's entire business plan (first, get everyone to use your platform by having ridiculously low margins, push every other distributor out of business, then, jack up prices), and I very much doubt Amazon is the only one doing so.
Maybe we should be arguing that Twitter's previous management simply weren't smart enough, and didn't find a proper way to monetize twitter yet. I do hope that is the case.
I've written before on this very topic - not building your house / business on other people's platform.
That said, I think there's a real opportunity for Twitter to grow via third party apps by being more open, they just haven't straddled the line of being both a consumer app and infrastructure company well previously.
I agree massively with lots of what Dustin Curtis has previously written about his vision for the platform:
"Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. Nothing great is Built On Twitter, even though it should be the most powerful realtime communications platform on Earth. There are simply no developer integration features for building stuff on top of Twitter as a platform, and that is absurd and disappointing. The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone. And yet the culture around the Twitter community has effectively banned such behavior because the product doesn’t have features to filter/organize such notifications."
They want the (hobbyist? / fun) apps yet, when something sizable comes along, the don't want someone else to run away with the ball. Coming out and saying to smaller indie developers now "If you build something decent, we'll take some revenue" I don't think would placate many. It may have been a decent way to start, but too much water under the bridge IMO.
That's different. Browsers have standards. What works in one browser, generally works in another. Twitter is a monopoly of Twitter. You can't hot plug your now homeless app into a different version of Twitter.
Very, very off-topic, but that quote reminds me of the magic of the first Mass Effect. I was quite disappointed that they went on to remove any and all mystery about the Reapers. The element of Lovecraftian horror was destroyed when no mystery was left, and all their claims about their nature turned out to just be fabricated.
I think I was only disappointed that they dropped the ME2 thread about some weird things happening with stars. Some Lovecraftian horror obviously had to go as the nature of Reapers was explored (the big part of the fear effect is what you don't know), but the end result wasn't bad - the story turned into surprisingly deep treatment on transhumanism and artificial intelligence safety.
The original article they reference is from 2012 and talks about the API changes and Twitter's choice to shut down apps it feels are competing with its own app.
All I got out of the current article was Jack trying to woo developers back without any hint of what exactly they're changing to be more developer friendly. If I was burned by them in 2012, I doubt this would get rid of any lingering doubts I had about working on their platform.
> Going forward, the company says it will improve its communication with developers. “We want to make sure that we have a great relationship with our developers, an open and honest relationship with our developers,” he said.
I'm curious why this kind of language hasn't fallen out of favor. It sounds so completely empty to me, I have to assume it does for everyone else.
Twitter has a responsibility to its employees & shareholders to turn a profit. In some stages, courting developers will make sense, and in others, not. A lot of developers are taking it like a jilted lover. This is a business relationship, and it is neither personal nor permanent. If you can build on their platform today, reap the success while it lasts. For some of you, that uncertainty is not worth the investment. Great! Just stop expecting Twitter to sacrifice business health to keep one group of partners happy.
Twitter has a responsibility to its employees & shareholders to turn a profit
Yes, but fucking over developers is not, generally speaking, a good way to accomplish that end! That's the sad thing about all of this... Twitter haven't just been hosing developers, they've been hosing themselves by destroying the ecosystem around Twitter, thereby making Twitter less valuable.
Twitter is a communication platform. Developers building on that platform is a great way to grow that platform, no?
This is especially true in that Twitter's mobile app has been terrible for many years. As Facebook and Google put tremendous resources into mobile, Twitter relied on high quality 3rd party apps like TweetBot while at the same time put ridiculous restrictions on them:
> Apps replicating Twitter’s core user experience (what we’ve called “traditional Twitter clients”) are discouraged and have a ceiling of 100,000 users, among other restrictions. Be sure to read the applicable TOS clauses carefully if you’re considering building such an app.
If twitter is so financially unhealthy that supporting platform would topple their 'business health,' then maybe their health wasn't that good to start with.
The problem is that some of these responses contain words like "trust" and "morally bankrupt" which shows we're still emotionally reliant on some unwritten rules of fair treatment. We have to conduct business without that emotion.
Show me a company who will not screw you, given the right (wrong?) circumstance. Yet we must partner with some of them temporarily to succeed. We should be gambling on whether or not they can build a viable business going forward, not whether they will ditch us in tough times because they absolutely will.
if you, as an individual developer, have invested your personal time, energy and money into developing a twitter app, and seen it all lost due to twitter fucking you over, claims of "nothing personal" ring awfully hollow. it may not be personal to twitter, but it definitely is to the developer.
I think most people have a reasonable expectation that when you release apis, you are setting up a long term relationship with developers and not to be ended on a whim. These people risked time and money to develop on your platform, and usually only did so because they expected more than a few years worth of profit.
Now of course there is no legal obligation for a company not to screw over the developers they attract. But it is scummy, and your reputation will be tarnished. It is not the norm yet.
If everyone starts releasing APIs and screwing developers as soon as it is convenient for them, then attracting developers to future platforms will become more difficult in the future.
As it stands now, you'd have to be an idiot to trust Twitter again.
The cry of "its nothing personal. its just business" is the last refuge of the morally bankrupt. You tell me if you think all those developers who lost their living when Twitter switched off their access if they thought it was personal.
It's not the developers who are naive, it's Twitter. It's like Twitter is Lucy, promising not to take the football away again at the last minute, with Charlie Brown as the developers.
Only this time, Charlie Brown is going to take his football and go home. Fuck Lucy.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/jf/status/524412388745818113?ref_src=tws...
<Access denied - TOS violation>
AAAAARGH! Good grief!"
"Our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable. We want to come to you today and apologize for the confusion."
Yeah it was the "confusion" that was wrong. Nothing like apologizing but not admitting fault either. He's basically saying "we did the right thing, we just didn't communicate it clearly."
Twitter "hoses" developers all the time who were making money based on apps supporting Twitter. They "hose" the developer because Twitter would rather make that money instead of allowing others to, yet they then fail to capitalize on the vacuum they just created.
Over time, it's made Twitter a seemingly very unattractive platform to try to dev against. Twitter doesn't make much in terms of earnings on their own, it seems it would be in their best interest to allow an ecosystem around their platform.
Happens all the time. App.net was original an "app store" for facebook but they decided to make a competitor called App Center or something and told App.net they could either be acquired or shut down.
They do, but that doesn't slam the door shut on a developer/business purely for the sake of slamming the door shut on a developer/business.
From what I've seen, Facebook encourages API usage. Twitter encourages it until you make money, then they shut you down - often stating they're building a similar app/service and you'd be competing with them -- only then to never launch said app/service.
Twitter as a platform isn't worth much (as evidenced by year after year of not turning profits). The value in Twitter is the data - but they are locking it away.
Why not go the Google route and charge for API usage over a certain threshold. Twitter could stop caring what users do with the data, and make money as their ecosystem grows and becomes more successful.
I think this is what makes people so hostile towards Twitter.
Twitter neither clones successful services nor continues to run those they acquire. Instead they either shut them down, or acquire then shut them down - meanwhile completely missing opportunity after opportunity to capitalize on their massive ocean of data.
It seems, based on history, Twitter is not interested in running many services around the Twitter platform/API/data. Instead they really just want to be "Twitter".
I say, let them do what they do best - acquire data and build great API's. Let 3rd parties build Twitter's userbase and data, but charge them for access to the API. It's a simple monetization plan.
On the other hand, Facebook's earliest users were just college kids snapping pics of each other.
Well, according to Jack, we tell him what the steps are by including hashtag #helloworld in our tweets to @twitter. So...yeah. https://twitter.com/jack/status/656885664525357056
"Thank you for holding. You call is very important to us."
At least he didn't "blame the victim" and make like everything is the developers fault.
That being said, this event is a whole event focused around Twitter developers, and this was seriously just a 9 minute talk by the CEO about a general vision of Twitter, with a 60 second part of it about the "we screwed up" piece. I don't think it's an appropriate situation for a self-flagellation and introspection.
Since then they've gone through and talked about new APIs, new toolkits, new data sources, all for developers.
I get that they still want to control their platform and that is objectionable to some folks, but it's hard to argue that they're not doing anything with developers.
Then, a few years later, the state department says, "Oh shit, nevermind", and pulls everyone's car registration except for the state department manufactured cars. Chaos reigns. People are angry.
A couple of years later, there's a lot of hard feelings, but the state department has changed their tune a little bit. You still have to use the state department cars for your personal vehicles, but you can mod them a little bit, or you can attach trailers to them, or you can pay extra to drive bigger cars, or a lot more to drive 18 wheelers. They make money from these things, and commit to those options with contracts and guidance about what is allowed and what isn't allowed.
At that point the state department says, "Geez, we're real sorry that we didn't think about what we were doing before". They've already demonstrated that they walked back on their earlier policy, and they have set clear guidelines and boundaries about what they do and don't allow.
I realize you still might be mad if you don't want to drive your government-issued car on the road, and you're entitled to that feeling, but what more do you expect the state department to do in terms of apologizing?
It's difficult to understand what Twitter is even talking about.
https://dev.twitter.com/overview/terms/agreement-and-policy
They'll match the sales that Salesforce had for fiscal 2014, within eight to ten quarters, even assuming slower growth.
Let the public access the THREE freaking floors of food in their HQ where each employee is required to act as a server (no pun) to customers for an hour or so a day.
The menu is a stream you follow, and you reply with "@table10 orders the tataki, chicken and veggies" and the SRE (service restaurant enabler) delivers the food while describing Flock...
Same way 3rd party developers helped originally grow twitter. A variety of twitter 3rd party tools drives user engagement with twitter. That data most likely has value that twitter simply hasn't figured out how to extract efficiently yet (slapping ads in the feed is an easy monetization strategy, not necessarily a good one).
If they required that developers with more than 100 users agree to pay $1:user:year, or %10 percent of gross receipts, whichever is greater, then app developers would have to have some means of making money, and the flowback would be to twitter, while still allowing for experimental apps to continue being developed.
Twitter cut off their nose despite their face here. Or for that matter, twitter itself could charge end users $10-15/year for being able to access their own account via API (anything but twitter's own client), and limit to X queries per day/month (something a real user is unlikely to exceed).. that would help keep the spam bots at bay.
They would still need to find a way to make money, which was exactly why Twitter started to limit the 3rd. party developers to begin with. They hoped that tighter control over their eco-system would help selling more ads.
What would developers build on top of Twitter that can make Twitter money? I don't question that you can build interesting and wonderful apps, using Twitter as infrastructure or as a data source, but that just burdens Twitter further. Either developers need to pay Twitter for access to their platform, or developers need to allow Twitter to push ads. Alternatively developers and Twitter can data-mine the crap out of their users and split the profit.
I just don't see what product Twitter could push that will cover their operational cost. Twitter is a publicly listed business, success is measured solely on profit.
Now, we also pull data from thousands of other providers, so it's not like we have all of our eggs in one basket, but we have a great business going where twitter is a significant percentage of the total volume of our data. Twitter also has certain advantages as a data source that many other providers don't.
A list of general suggestions for them: https://medium.com/@sthware/suggestions-for-twitter-hellowor...
Edit: I'll add that if relations get repaired now and then broken again, I don’t think they’ll be fixable a third time. They need to get this right, IMO.
That's just a fundamental lack of imagination.
There's all kinds of things that can be built on that, if you can rely on the platform to remain available to you.
Yet billions of dollars later and nobody there realised it? I can't imagine people there are so stupid and that they'd come read HN, smack they hand on their heads and say "Oh, we never knew, thanks HN commenters for saving us. We'll make a great profit and share it with you!".
But not to miss out, and join HN armchair analysts group, I for one, don't believe Twitter is that useful or valuable. Does it know what my neighbors are thinking? My boss? My grandma? Me? No, because I am not on Twitter, they are not.
I see a lot of garbage on Twitter usually. Silly status lines "mmm, yummy green salad!" or "what is the meaning of life..". Developers would do something like "Compiling takes too long, we need a new compiler!". And so on. Then of course it is the quintessential platform for spats and misunderstandings. It is hard to express ideas in 140 character lines so everything feels short, mean and snippy and people get into lengthy back and forths that are mostly stupid and pointless.
Is it impossible to monitise what they do? No, but I think it is not as clear-cut as it may seem.
I'm actually more inclined to tweet when I find something interesting... partly because looking at my own history works better than browser bookmarks at this point.. and partly because someone else might also find it interesting.
Well Twitter should embrace that fact instead pulling the plug on successful Twitter based products and offer paid plans for business who want to build on top of twitter.
An on-prem corporate twitter would actually be useful.
(Not saying twitter didn't deserve this)
[0] Application not being an "app", but more of a new way to use twitter.
Same problem they are facing with the massive number of users that tried Twitter and abandoned it. Much easier to acquire a new user than to re-acquire an old user that has already decided against.
I reckon twitter will merge with square and provide end-to-end advertising metrics for impressions --> clicks --> cart additions --> purchases. This will be valuable, and as much as I think twitter is silly, if they provide this they will do well.
Platform companies with stroes:
* Microsoft
* Google Play
* Apple
* [ empty ]
Super conflated and contrived appraisal here, but Twitter better post a strong offering in empty before facebook and they can't do that well without square and a platform or decentralized market. All this is to say, Twitter needs developers bad and to the extent they win them from Facebook and other platforms will be tied to the value they provide. I think that value will be provided by purchasing square in a merger of equals and building a dumb pipe platform, letting developers curate the content and providing stores.
We'll see what developer sentiment is, first few comments lead me to beleive it is not great.
I agree about the current state of developer sentiment. I think anyone who looks at a company like Microsoft will see that developer sentiment isn't static. Might take years for things to change but I commend them for taking the right first steps towards rectifying the situation.
The question is, what has fundamentally changed about Twitter's business model that has now re-aligned its incentives to better match those of the developer community to enable them to make this promise today?
Anything?
This is the cart before the horse. They need to fix Twitter so that people want to develop for it again, not say "Hey, here's this downtrodden mess, come and make it better for us!"
The wisdom became "Don't build your business on another one." and twitter was the primary example of why not. For twitter to turn around and say "Ok, we made some mistakes, and we want to develop that trust again." is misunderstanding what happened.
twitter changed the conventional wisdom, not just wisdom about twitter.
That wisdom is WAY older than twitter. It may have become a fashionable meme again because of Twitter, but platform risk has been around probably about as long as computing. Certainly the idea goes back at least as far as the infamous DOS/Lotus 1-2-3 dustup. Google "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" for example. Note that whether or not Microsoft actually tried to break Lotus 1-2-3 isn't the point. I'm just saying people have been aware of, and talking about, these kinds of risks for a LONG time.
"The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Startups rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory they are extinguished. Lotus were not the first. They did not create the Platform. They did not forge the APIs. They merely found them - the legacy of my kind." - Twitter CEO in my twisted imagination.
Twitter's attitude towards developers is potentially impacting the uptake of libraries like Fabric, despite having nothing to do with their API. What Twitter may have a shot at, as a result of this effort is to get usage of their libraries like Fabric on par standing ground with libraries and products like Parse from Facebook.
http://goo.gl/WfAiPU
"We have opened up our API, and have placed $5B in escrow with the Gates Foundation, who will return 70% of the investment income to Twitter. If we deny API access to developers before 2020, the Gates Foundation will keep the principal."
Someone sufficiently clever could make a similar, but perpetual, statement.
I still don't understand why people feel they are entitled to perpetual API access.
Maybe Twitter should follow the lead that I do - those that license and use many of my APIs pay on a royalty model - they pay a certain percentage of all revenue that their platform generates. Period.
And after that, Twitter felt like it's platform had been evolved by other people long enough and said "alright everyone, we don't want you anymore" and killed businesses overnight.
> And this is exactly how it should be. If you want to build your business on the back of someone else who is doing the heavy lifting,
In this case, it was a group of people who built twitter's business (and then their business) on top of the Twitter backbone. Put another way, Twitter wouldn't be what it is without the developers.
The side effect of all of this is that Twitter's innovation has since languished. They've settled into incremental changes such as the way you view hashtags of an event now. I get that that's not a trivial thing either, but their business model should have always been about increasing capabilities of Twitter's core based on what other developers made interesting (the retweet is an example of something like this done really well).
My first statement. It's about asking people to be not lazy. Twitter stepped in and thought "hmm we can't control our ad experience in a world like this so let's shut down the people who've built our business all these days"
That's lazy. That's the result of a bingo meeting that couldn't come to a conclusion on any alternative suggestion and instead opted to use a nuke.
If they really cared, they could have asked developers at the time. They had a great relationship then and they could have avoided this entire thing of asking developers for feedback now. They could have done that back then, and I'm sure people would have come up with great suggestions and compromises.
And the argument here is that once someone has a decent part of the market, they can't start eating the people that built the market for them ? Good luck with that one. Hell, it's Amazon's entire business plan (first, get everyone to use your platform by having ridiculously low margins, push every other distributor out of business, then, jack up prices), and I very much doubt Amazon is the only one doing so.
Maybe we should be arguing that Twitter's previous management simply weren't smart enough, and didn't find a proper way to monetize twitter yet. I do hope that is the case.
That said, I think there's a real opportunity for Twitter to grow via third party apps by being more open, they just haven't straddled the line of being both a consumer app and infrastructure company well previously.
I agree massively with lots of what Dustin Curtis has previously written about his vision for the platform:
"Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. Nothing great is Built On Twitter, even though it should be the most powerful realtime communications platform on Earth. There are simply no developer integration features for building stuff on top of Twitter as a platform, and that is absurd and disappointing. The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone. And yet the culture around the Twitter community has effectively banned such behavior because the product doesn’t have features to filter/organize such notifications."
http://dcurt.is/twitter
They want the (hobbyist? / fun) apps yet, when something sizable comes along, the don't want someone else to run away with the ball. Coming out and saying to smaller indie developers now "If you build something decent, we'll take some revenue" I don't think would placate many. It may have been a decent way to start, but too much water under the bridge IMO.
How is it possible not to? Do you only write apps for your own OS or browser that you also wrote?
How is writing a "Twitter app" (if that becomes a thing) fundamentally different from writing an iOS app or a Windows app or a Chrome app?
And when the host eventually says "hey, come ride again" what else do you expect the response to be?
The original article they reference is from 2012 and talks about the API changes and Twitter's choice to shut down apps it feels are competing with its own app.
All I got out of the current article was Jack trying to woo developers back without any hint of what exactly they're changing to be more developer friendly. If I was burned by them in 2012, I doubt this would get rid of any lingering doubts I had about working on their platform.
I'm curious why this kind of language hasn't fallen out of favor. It sounds so completely empty to me, I have to assume it does for everyone else.
Twitter has a responsibility to its employees & shareholders to turn a profit. In some stages, courting developers will make sense, and in others, not. A lot of developers are taking it like a jilted lover. This is a business relationship, and it is neither personal nor permanent. If you can build on their platform today, reap the success while it lasts. For some of you, that uncertainty is not worth the investment. Great! Just stop expecting Twitter to sacrifice business health to keep one group of partners happy.
Yes, but fucking over developers is not, generally speaking, a good way to accomplish that end! That's the sad thing about all of this... Twitter haven't just been hosing developers, they've been hosing themselves by destroying the ecosystem around Twitter, thereby making Twitter less valuable.
We had a plan that would make them money - they without notice just killed our API access.
Why didn't they call us first?
Fuck that, not going near them.
This is especially true in that Twitter's mobile app has been terrible for many years. As Facebook and Google put tremendous resources into mobile, Twitter relied on high quality 3rd party apps like TweetBot while at the same time put ridiculous restrictions on them:
> Apps replicating Twitter’s core user experience (what we’ve called “traditional Twitter clients”) are discouraged and have a ceiling of 100,000 users, among other restrictions. Be sure to read the applicable TOS clauses carefully if you’re considering building such an app.
If twitter is so financially unhealthy that supporting platform would topple their 'business health,' then maybe their health wasn't that good to start with.
I think in a business relationship (just like in almost any relationship), you don't want to get screwed over. Developers got screwed over by Twitter.
You want this to be a business relationship? Then write out an SLA for developers. Otherwise apologizing and inviting developers is just lip service.
I love what they have done with open source, I just don't trust them enough to develop stuff on their api (short of twitter bots and the like).
Show me a company who will not screw you, given the right (wrong?) circumstance. Yet we must partner with some of them temporarily to succeed. We should be gambling on whether or not they can build a viable business going forward, not whether they will ditch us in tough times because they absolutely will.
"Morally bankrupt" is just an insulting way of saying the company is much more likely to abandon agreements, and will do so with weaker justification.
And plenty of companies won't ditch you in tough times. Imagine if insurance tried to just walk away when you filed a claim.
Now of course there is no legal obligation for a company not to screw over the developers they attract. But it is scummy, and your reputation will be tarnished. It is not the norm yet.
If everyone starts releasing APIs and screwing developers as soon as it is convenient for them, then attracting developers to future platforms will become more difficult in the future.
As it stands now, you'd have to be an idiot to trust Twitter again.
It's not the developers who are naive, it's Twitter. It's like Twitter is Lucy, promising not to take the football away again at the last minute, with Charlie Brown as the developers.
Only this time, Charlie Brown is going to take his football and go home. Fuck Lucy.