What surprises me is not that a platform provider will do things in its own interests, it's that people keep falling for it.<p>Seriously.<p>This isn't new eg [1].<p>Also, I don't really buy into the argument that these third-party providers is what made Twitter popular. IMHO Twitter made Twitter popular and the devs just followed the money.<p>[1]: <a href="http://gigaom.com/2011/06/07/fred-wilson-to-devs-expect-platform-owners-to-work-against-you/" rel="nofollow">http://gigaom.com/2011/06/07/fred-wilson-to-devs-expect-plat...</a>
Back in 2009, I was doing a lot of social network research with the Web Ecology Project (<a href="http://www.webecologyproject.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webecologyproject.org/</a>).<p>Among other things, we captured a 100% set of tweets surrounding the election in Iran in 09, and released a paper on them. It was interesting, because it ended up all being a bit of a precursor to the Arab Spring and many current events in the middle east today.<p>I loved doing it. The API team was responsive, and although we were never able to get full Firehose (despite offerring large amount of money) we were able to easily play with and access a lot of data.<p>Much/all of that has changed. The API has gotten really complex to work with. The terms of service are no longer friendly. Getting whitelisted accounts for standard API calls is impossible, and overall feeling like we have any influence or use to Twitter is dwindling.<p>Whereas at one point I felt it was a joy to work with, now I feel its impossible. Getting the data to study is impossible (or expensive, since a few companies control the firehose), and there's the constant feeling of getting shut down at any moment. Plus, there's just too much data to grab given the clunky methods you have to use to do it. I'd kill for a hard drive of the 'network graph' with diffs over time. As-is, its impossible to answer certain academic questions.<p>To a certain degree, while Twitter is used far more now than in 2009, it feels boring, obvious and less important to me. So at the end of the day, nothing of value was lost, but I do miss it as it was interesting at one point.
I was kind of hoping Dorsey coming back to Twitter would have put an end to or at least subdued their hostility to their developer community, but it doesn't appear to be the case. Their new proprietary attachments are even more concerning than this.<p>Costolo and Ev are dickish enough you expect crap from them, but Dorsey used to have some hacker cool. I wonder if either Dorsey doesn't have enough power to swing Twitter back to being open and cool again, or if he's drunk the rich and famous Koolaid to the point he just wants to cash out in a big IPO and doesn't care about the things he used to care about.<p>Regrettably companies trying to squeeze enough revenue out of "free" Internet services to have a successful IPO are pretty much compelled to be complete dicks, so its probably gonna happen.<p>It just kind of sucks that Twitter is the absolute coolest news stream there is, there aren't any good replacements and you KNOW they are going to totally wreck it by the time they IPO or within a year of going public and we are going to all have to start over on some new "never heard of" clone. Then repeat cycle endlessly every few years. Dave Winer will keep shouting to use RSS but RSS completely sucks by comparison.<p>As an aside a few days ago I read New Yorker and some other mags were getting weary of letting Flipbook scrape their content and were going to just put a lead in and link users to their main web site through flipbook instead. I'm thinking, wow that's what Twitter was already doing. I totally never understood what Flipbook offered to justify the hype. A good Twitter stream in a good client is infinitely better.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment...<p>The first app created a layer between twitter and its users which meant that stripping ads would be trivial & likely universal (they don't put ads in 3rd party app streams <i>yet</i> but should they chose to this would stop them) and you could be harvesting the analytics and user metainfo that twitter wants to sell for ad-targeting against what they probably consider "their" content. I can see how they would take exception to a service that allows users to <i>fully</i> control their interaction with twitter; it could seem too much like "handing the keys over" to a third party.<p>TweetFavor (ironically) seems that it would worsen the signal to noise ratio that Proxlet aimed to improve. Friends turning themselves into voluntary zombies in a twitter spam botnet? I know it's not actually that bad but I can see why twitter would want to cut this off.<p>None of this excuses the manner with which twitter did what they did, and like I said, "Devil's Advocate," neither of the apps were <i>that</i> bad, but it's not unfathomable to me why twitter would have a problem with them.
<i>Moral of the story: be-wary of developing applications with dependency to a platform</i><p>Yep. Or at least "be-wary of developing applications with dependency to a platform unless you control it, it's easily replicable, or you have a legally binding SLA in place with the provider."<p>We're seeing more and more of this kind of thing, and people need to realize that you can't build something sustainable by relying on the happenstance goodwill of some arbitrary API provider.
A group of us developed an app for published research work that used the streaming API within academia. The amount of hoops we had to jump through for the necessary access was absurd. It's as if the attitude is "it's a privilege for you to use this API", as opposed to making it a viable platform.
They used to say this about Microsoft.
<a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace" rel="nofollow">http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...</a><p>Now it can apply to any company that provides developers an API.
Sadly, I don't think there's any kind of "social contract" with web services providing APIs. Just as the exploitation of crowdsourced data is now common practice (including personal data), most organizations provide APIs only as long as they find free access in their own interest. There's little loyalty or feeling that they owe users anything, at all.
and today they post this <a href="https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-twitter-experience" rel="nofollow">https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-twitter-e...</a>
This is why open source triumphs in platform spaces: if your business relies on another company's intellectual property it can be destroyed at any time.
What Twitter is doing is extremely damaging to developers and the perception of APIs. But let's not bundle all APIs as terrible. The Twilio's, Stripe's and other progressive APIs know how to treat devs and respect them. We just need to make sure we are equally vocal about the good and the bad in the space.
If you base your app on 3rd party APIs, and charge users for using your app, don't you have any liability in case the API shuts you off?
Would a TOS clause with something like "We will not be held responsible if our service providers cease to function. Also no refunds." give any protection?
A company you did not pay and do not help generate revenue (doesn't one of them actually reduce ad impressions?) arbitrarily disconnected you from using their server resources? Crazy talk...
Twitter gained a lot of popularity on the back of a vibrant third party ecosystem. Now that they're established, it seems that the have deemed those same third party developers a threat and have turned on them. Just another example of why basing your company on someone else's platform is a bad idea.
><i>Moral of the story: be-wary of developing applications with dependency to a platform.</i><p>I've come to the conclusion that this belongs in the category of "Make regular backups" and "Use unique passwords and a password manager".<p>Everyone knows they should, and yet so many people refuse to accept that it could happen to them. I don't know if it's hubris or arrogance. How many times has this lesson been displayed in the last week on HN, let alone the last 4 years. iOS, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Twitter, often Facebook.<p>Not me! My app is too {small, unique, creative} to be a problem.
Exactly the reason why I am so paranoid about third party APIs. I even asked this over a HN post here but did not get much response.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4162370" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4162370</a>