And this is exactly how it should be. If you want to build your business on the back of someone else who is doing the heavy lifting, then don't be surprised when they rear up and no longer let you ride.
I still don't understand why people feel they are entitled to perpetual API access.
Maybe Twitter should follow the lead that I do - those that license and use many of my APIs pay on a royalty model - they pay a certain percentage of all revenue that their platform generates. Period.
It's not about entitlement. It's about asking people not to be lazy. Twitter grew into what it is today BECAUSE of 3rd party developers. Their core revenue which is ads has its roots embedded in what other people invented like the hashtag, and the retweets. Their user engagement and growth was given birth to BY these same developers who created great experiences when Twitter didn't have the resources to do so.
And after that, Twitter felt like it's platform had been evolved by other people long enough and said "alright everyone, we don't want you anymore" and killed businesses overnight.
> And this is exactly how it should be. If you want to build your business on the back of someone else who is doing the heavy lifting,
In this case, it was a group of people who built twitter's business (and then their business) on top of the Twitter backbone. Put another way, Twitter wouldn't be what it is without the developers.
The side effect of all of this is that Twitter's innovation has since languished. They've settled into incremental changes such as the way you view hashtags of an event now. I get that that's not a trivial thing either, but their business model should have always been about increasing capabilities of Twitter's core based on what other developers made interesting (the retweet is an example of something like this done really well).
My first statement. It's about asking people to be not lazy. Twitter stepped in and thought "hmm we can't control our ad experience in a world like this so let's shut down the people who've built our business all these days"
That's lazy. That's the result of a bingo meeting that couldn't come to a conclusion on any alternative suggestion and instead opted to use a nuke.
If they really cared, they could have asked developers at the time. They had a great relationship then and they could have avoided this entire thing of asking developers for feedback now. They could have done that back then, and I'm sure people would have come up with great suggestions and compromises.
This is the fundamental change that you accept with using SAAS software - like twitter or so many other things nowadays. Whereas if you're running your company on something like office, you're guaranteed access to what you have in perpetuity. With SAAS software, the software can change, can be discontinued, can disappear without warning, can start spying on you, can ...
And the argument here is that once someone has a decent part of the market, they can't start eating the people that built the market for them ? Good luck with that one. Hell, it's Amazon's entire business plan (first, get everyone to use your platform by having ridiculously low margins, push every other distributor out of business, then, jack up prices), and I very much doubt Amazon is the only one doing so.
Maybe we should be arguing that Twitter's previous management simply weren't smart enough, and didn't find a proper way to monetize twitter yet. I do hope that is the case.
I've written before on this very topic - not building your house / business on other people's platform.
That said, I think there's a real opportunity for Twitter to grow via third party apps by being more open, they just haven't straddled the line of being both a consumer app and infrastructure company well previously.
I agree massively with lots of what Dustin Curtis has previously written about his vision for the platform:
"Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it. Nothing great is Built On Twitter, even though it should be the most powerful realtime communications platform on Earth. There are simply no developer integration features for building stuff on top of Twitter as a platform, and that is absurd and disappointing. The fact that automatic tweets from apps are considered rude is one of the biggest failings of Twitter’s product team–Twitter should be the place for apps to broadcast realtime information about someone. And yet the culture around the Twitter community has effectively banned such behavior because the product doesn’t have features to filter/organize such notifications."
They want the (hobbyist? / fun) apps yet, when something sizable comes along, the don't want someone else to run away with the ball. Coming out and saying to smaller indie developers now "If you build something decent, we'll take some revenue" I don't think would placate many. It may have been a decent way to start, but too much water under the bridge IMO.
That's different. Browsers have standards. What works in one browser, generally works in another. Twitter is a monopoly of Twitter. You can't hot plug your now homeless app into a different version of Twitter.
I still don't understand why people feel they are entitled to perpetual API access.
Maybe Twitter should follow the lead that I do - those that license and use many of my APIs pay on a royalty model - they pay a certain percentage of all revenue that their platform generates. Period.