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.
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.
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.
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.
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.