Joel Spolsky said it best in his Mixergy interview:<p>basically, if you were a platform developer ... you're in a dangerous position. You are snatching nickels in front of an oncoming bulldozer.
"There are over 100,000 applications leveraging the Twitter API"<p>That's probably evidence enough that investing in developing for Twitter is kinda fruitless. There's just too much crud out there.<p>This coming from a Twitter iPhone app and web developer. Likely adding to the crud...
fool me once, shame on you.. fool me twice, shame on me. By now we should realize the pattern with twitter is that any company that adds real value to twitter, they are more than willing to take the idea, and build a competing service. Search, trends, ads, alt. clients, and url shorteners. They fooled us all when they said they just wanted to be the pipe.
The terms [1] were just updated to reflect these changes. There are some interesting tidbits under the commercial use section, including: "In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us..."<p>[1] - <a href="http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms" rel="nofollow">http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms</a>
This begs the question: how does Twitter define a "paid" tweet? Does payment from advertiser to service or service to publisher matter? Do both? What about Foursquare/Gowalla checkins? Would those count as "paid"? What if a business rewards its mayor for all his checkins... do the mayor's tweets now count as "paid"?
The more I think about this situation, the less I like it.<p>At first I was happy that the service I work on was not banned by this
ToS change. Even though we use twitter data for monetisation, we don't
insert data into timelines.<p>However, when I look at the services that have now been banned, I
can't see any warning signs other than that they were competing with
Twitter for monetising their data. This is what my service does. Even
though it's not currently banned, doesn't it make sense to abandon
development now? The best I can hope for it that it <i>isn't</i> wildly
successful, so Twitter doesn't consider it competition...<p>Every time I read Twitter's explanation for the situation, it reads as
"we know our monetisation strategy can't compete with third parties in
the short term, so we're banning all competition". Hardly conducive to
fostering the best solutions, particularly when Twitter will always
have the upper hand with their "official" monetisation platform and
analytics for resonance, anyway. What's even worse is the the new ToS
is <i>still</i> completely ambiguous. Until I saw Peter's post here I had
no idea that the ban was only in the publishing end, not insertion.<p>Of course all this makes sense from Twitter's perspective, but for
third parties... that just leaves us on an ever changing playing field
with invisible goals. I could have lived with rules and rev share
additions, but completely banning competition... not so much.<p>PS what's the point of this paragraph from the blog post? "We
understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service
prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money. We will
continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations
capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create
innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform." a
slap in the face? We understand that we've wasted your time and money,
so here's the next thing for you to waste time and money on. No
guarantees, no apologies.
So I take it I was the only one who thought this was a strikingly clear explanation of how Twitter sees itself and how they intend to develop their ecosystem? A really excellent piece of communication.
Should be easy for Twitter to put a limit on the number of ads that will be inserted during a period of time. Like build it into their API. API ads.<p>Kinda lame though. They could have just made it part of their TOS. Only X number of ads can be shown after X tweets.<p>Twitter must have $$ in the eyes.