Twitter already betrayed their entire dev base all those years ago when they effectively killed off all 3rd party clients by setting a lifetime cap on oauth tokens per developer just so they could force users to use their clients which inject ppa/ppc ads into the stream (and then didn’t even bother keeping those clients up to date, pissing both the developers and their users off in one go). Stupidest move ever on their end. All they’d have had to do is mandate the inclusion of promoted tweets in the firehouse and they’d have kept developers loyal to their platform while raking in the cash.
Also, if I’m not mistaken, retweeting and hashtags were done first by third party clients. Even the word tweet was coined in an email Blaine Cook sent discussing twitter’s auth API for 3rd party clients.
Previously (sometime last year, IIRC) Jack Dorsey asked developers for a second chance. I don't see how this lines up with that, is it that now we can pay them to access artificially capped functionality? This was never the problem for me, and in the meantime, nearly all of the devs seem to have [wisely] moved on.
I'm not interested in participating in another one-sided relationship with a company who behaves as Twitter has -
changing the functionality and rules at the drop of a hat.
Except that they didn't. There wasn't even any discussion, it was just "We're capping OAuth tokens.". Developers offered to pay for access, users offered to pay for the ability to use 3rd party apps.
If they didn't want to go down that path then Twitter could've easily required developers to show monetised tweets/ads.
Just because Twitter couldn't figure out how to monetize their APIs? Please. They could have made some premium before. They could have forced ads in the tweet stream as part of the usage requirements for the APIs etc.
They killed a community due to arrogance. And it backfired big.
It was early on to come up with any conclusions but dropping developers in the XXI century? Do you know any other company who did that?
The problem with Twitter was more serious: they never gave a concise and frictionless way to pay for the API. For example, Google innovation with AdWords was providing a self and quick service to put ads while other providers like Yahoo required a process with a lot of friction. Twitter logic was prehistoric.
I have been on tweetbot for as long as I can remember and can't stand the official apps, how does this work? Are some 3rd party clients blessed by Twitter?
They basically issued each developer n tokens and the first n people to purchase the app were let through, but no more thereafter.
What genius thought “let’s punish developers in our ecosystem by putting a cap on their lifetime earnings” should be taken out back and summarily executed.
The amount of people who can authenticate (as in, connect to the app once by linking their account) is limited to a certain amount. Developers are / were given a fixed amount of user tokens.
Fixed per app, or fixed per period of time? I.e. does it mean that when I use Tweetbot I'm either a) part of a lucky group of people that authenticated before they "ran out" of tokens, or b) that every time I log in I risk being shut out because too many people authenticated in the last 24h towards their tokens?
I keep recommending everyone to abandon the official apps and use e.g. Tweetbot because the official apps suck compared to 3rd party (commercial messages alone is a dealbreaker) - but do peolpe then take my advice and go download tweetbot only to find they cant auth? That would be bad...
