I was reading through the Twitter dev mailing list, and found this poignant observation from a poster:
The most telling change in the Terms of Service occurred in sentence
#2 or paragraph #1 under section Rules of the Road.
It used to read: "We want to empower our ecosystem partners to build
valuable BUSINESSES around the information flowing through Twitter."
It now (since March 11, 2011) reads: "We want to empower our ecosystem
partners to build valuable TOOLS around the information flowing
through Twitter."
It's not so much poignant (or any such emotional response) as it is interesting. And it doesn't really strike me as interesting either. It just seems like a rewording to be more inclusive.
To me, "businesses" imply "people that make money", "tools" implies "people that make money, produce public services, etc".
If your business is built entirely on someone else's ecosystem there are two possible outcomes:
1. You fail or have meager success;
2. You're very successful at which point the ecosystem provider will probably judge what you do important enough to acquire you (or one of your competitors!) or compete with you and have the home advantage.
The fact that some convinced themselves that Twitter was "different" might want to refer to the Peanuts theme of Lucy and the football.
> If your business is built entirely on someone else's ecosystem there are two possible outcomes:
> 1. You fail or have meager success;
I don't know why people keep repeating this fallacy. There is no shortage of counter-examples, the most obvious being Zynga (hell, the homepage has a story about Angry Birds' massive success _right now_, which is another example).
> There is no shortage of counter-examples, the most obvious being Zynga
And if you don't think Zynga is at risk from a change of policy by Facebook you're kidding yourself.
It's a gamble. A huge gamble. Zynga may in fact be large enough now to survive war with Facebook but they'd be savaged and greatly diminished by it (IMHO).
Look no further than the move to Facebook Credits [1] to see who really wields the power in this relationship. Facebook has exacted a 30% cut, forced on app developers (interestingly I haven't seen quite the same outrage at this as I have about iOS subscription changes).
Of course there's a risk, but that doesn't mean its a bad idea.
I would say a great deal of the companies in the world are somehow at the mercy of the fates, in a way similar to Zynga. A bus stop moves, and your convenience store no longer gets traffic for example. Lockheed Martin has one major customer - what would happen if the DoD arbitrarily changed the rules for them? Every tech company relies on Google and Twitter for marketing and traffic, what if they got caught it some algorithmic change and stopped getting search traffic?
And so what - there's risk everywhere, but there's opportunity too. At the risk of getting screwed, Zynga carved a $200m a year business. And now what? They get 30% less? A nice problem to have.
I think you misunderstand the meaning of "A nice problem to have". It's like when you have so many users that things start to fall over. Basically that millions of people want to have the same problem you have.
I agree with this, but that's a gamble people have been taking for years, most often with Microsoft.
I think it does come down to how big of an asshole the ecosystem provider is. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, etc have all done this. And they have to weigh fucking over a partner against the benefit to their core product from muscling in on their partner's turf.
As a developer, people have been asking for years "How valuable would this be as a part of Windows?" and "How big a dick is Microsoft?" and "Do we have any competitive advantages over Microsoft?" and deciding whether it's worth taking the risk to build a particular business on Windows.
But in the end, you've got to build on someone else's platform, whether it's Windows or Twitter or iOS... or as in Mahalo's case, depending on Google for your traffic.
So twitter used developers to boost adoption (covering a UX deficiency) and market penetration, then when they got universally known (and powerful enough to build their own stuff now) they kicked devs in the ass?
The past year and half, Twitter has given me the distinct impression of being the dog that chased a car and actually got the car, now it does not know what to do with the car.
For a more reasonable analogy, Twitter is the equivalent of a telco. They are the plumbing and the dumb pipe of the 140 character web at the moment. That alone does not guarantee enough returns to justify the billion-plus dollar valuation. Sadly, they don't have any other choice than to stifle the same community that built the tooling which led them to be the success story they are today.
I am a convert - from an eternal pessimist to a nouveau-optimist. But, even that does not spare me from being very pessimistic about the eventual fate of Twitter.
If that assumption is right, they are on a limited timeframe where their burn rate will eclipse their average possible spends (funds brought in via investments + revenue).
In effect, they have a very short time frame to get this story right - irrespective of whether they piss off the developer ecosystem or not.
I don't like "dead future" stories, but I don't think this is going to wind up with a different fate.
For me, it's not only the fact they're just dismissing the community which got them to where they are today, but that the statement just felt wrong.
It's contradictory - they want UI/UX consistency, but are encouraging non-core-client diversity, and they're complaining about user confusion when they're bragging about holding 90% client share. Plus the timing could have been better. Releasing the statement yesterday when there was nothing time sensitive to it probably wasn't the best approach for them (seen to be burying bad news).
Building your entire business on someone else's ecosystem is always a risky strategy, but when a company who has reached critical mass pretty much solely because of that ecosystem, to turn around and tell them they're no longer required is poor form.
Twitter is really concerned about monetizing the 10% that don't use the official Twitter clients? That seems very corporate. I was happy when Twitter broke into the mainstream (Tweets from celebrities and/or Tweets quoted/shown on major news networks), and this latest development seems to show that they effectively want a scrolling CNN News type ticker (eventually) in their UI of promoted "trends" (how can it be a trend if it is promoted)?
Are they going to block anonymous API usage as well?
I would be really annoyed as I don't like morassing through OAuth to get a Tweet.
Sorry, accidental downvote when copy/pasting the following:
"Twitter is really concerned about monetizing the 10% that don't use the official Twitter clients?"
No, I think Twitter is concerned that monetizing the 90% (via user-hostile moves like the dickbar) will grow that non-monetizable 10%. I.e., in order to do the things they want to do, they can't have pleasant, usable alternatives out there that people can switch to.
Promoted trends are popular trends already (may not be the top 10 but they are popular trends). Twitter just places a promoted tweet from the advertiser when you click on a trend. You cannot be a promoted trend without reaching some popularity first.
And just because it needs saying somewhere, and is also symptomatic of corporate ego problems:
Dear Twitter, if I follow a link to your one of your feeds, then hit the back button, I expect to be back where I started, not at some portal function for further twittiness.
Is there some mechanism where by a startup, or any company for that matter, might provide some guarantee with their API that they will not change it? Some kind of legal contract that isn't so onerous that it must involve expensive lawyers for every single developer sign up? What amount of time for API support would be satisfactory?
Seems to me that Twitter sort of did this via a simple terms of use and that now they are making changes for new developers not existing ones. APIs are never going to last forever. I agree Twitter's new stance is bad for developers and users but the way they went about it seems reasonable to me. The why doesn't seem reasonable but it doesn't really matter. This isn't the great API apocalypse of 2011 though. I do not feel less discouraged to make use of APIs today than I did yesterday.
Well, yes, it's called.. a contract. An API provider could put their obligations in writing, though they would probably have to charge at least a small fee to make the contract stand.
But providers are not going to do that unless developers make it worth their while, and vice-versa. The economics of open APIs just don't support that kind of commitment on either end.
If you want to build a business around someone's free API, you better have a quick exit planned.
Yes, this is very normal in financial services, but it's not "forever". Rather "we will support API version x for y years" in writing, with cash having changed hands.
Their move motivates the discussion of the merits of the premise that developers really are a commodity, and what is important and fundamental is the ecosystem. Developing facebook apps is a nightmare of constantly having to hit a moving target, and constantly updating and maintaining old code. I've left and abandoned that area, but companies like zynga clearly have stayed and have even begun breaking out of that ecosystem. This is not just an online or social media phenomenon but also extends to brick and mortar stores, malls, mail order catalogs, etc.
I feel like there are three groups of people, the people that have always realized that it's twitter's prerogative to act in it's own economic best interest and never trusted the idea of building a business on that, the second group that knows that to be true, but thought 'oh twitter is an exception' and the third that simply heard twitter's initial press releases that 'we don't care about monetization' and we're different.
Premise: Everyone's going to target the ecosystem that has people on it, before it was search and look at all of the SEO spam, currently it's twitter and facebook, and the goal is to engage users via that customer acquisition platform, and eventually build your own community and continue the cycle.
In those days, and I hope my memory isn’t failing me, the number of tweets from third party clients was dramatically higher than those “from the web”.
That hasn't been my experience (in seeing what people I follow use since Dec 2006) and I've seen a few surveys over the years which, to my memory, showed the Web client as being the most popular (even taking the majority, usually). One I just dug up: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_twitter_clients_def...
It's not exactly the point, though, and it doesn't make Twitter's new stance any less ridiculous, but the Web client is certainly popular. I'm biased though, been using it since 2006 and 25,000 tweets..
The implicit nature of an open client ecosystem fuels innovation. Has twitter, decided they will control innovation on the platform going forward? An Apple HIG-like policy should be seriously considered before this drastic cutoff.
