2008 - Facebook had a meeting with us Crowdstar describing how our current business model (quizzes) was getting their own section in their TOS, and would cease to exist.
2010 - After switching to a game model and doing quite well - neck and neck with Zynga. We were walked into a Facebook meeting room and told a bizarre story how Mark was upset about friend feed forms. They explained that we could only share (by means of post feed forms) our games with people that already had our games. Pleading did nothing, they ended that model. Zynaga is still flailing around.
2012 - I changed companies and focused on mobile advertising. Another decent path with 12 employees or so. We got a phone call . [EDIT REMOVED REST OF STORY]
2015 - I received another phone call from a large company (They deal in search) . I wont go into this one.
* Phone calls from large companies are extremely bad. That means they don't want things in writing.
So sure, have fun with working with large companies. Just remember one thing: they hate you.
Large companies don't hate you, they are simply (like "nature" or the universe) indifferent towards your well-being or continued existence... which is perfectly understandable, really. And, yes, this fact should really give pause to people who are thinking about basing an entire company around an API, portal or other service that is 100% controlled by a large company. Any such dependency should be seen as the huge risk factor that it is.
And while innocent bystanders do get whacked from time-to-time, I find that more often than not when big companies change their TOS in ways that impact other companies, there's actually a pretty decent reason behind the changes.
Facebook feeds got extremely spammy around the Zynga days, they are much better now (tolerable, at least, though still far from perfect). Not sure what your google story is, but I've heard lots of startup folks complain about changes google has made to their algorithms or TOS policies that hurt them only to visit their sites or look at their apps and see that they were actually pretty spammy and really deserved the deranking.
On the contrary, I think this just goes to show how challenging it is to build a business that is 100% defensible, and doesn't rely on another platform/company.
Building an app? OK, better hope it doesn't violate Apple's TOS.
Building a consumer website? OK, better hope Google's next update doesn't affect you negatively.
Building a Buffer competitor? OK, better hope Twitter doesn't ban you from their API
Or plan for it and make hay while the sun shines and try to diversify who you depend on? I mean Zynaga may still be flailing around but it's also still valued at over $2bn.
I meant the second sentence too - I mean, if your startups are failing for the same reason one after another, you need to break the pattern somehow. He could get a job at Google for instance, regroup 2-3 years and then decide what to do next.
Corps don't hate you, they use and plunder, their plans executed with a blind determination of a hivemind, no emotions involved(usually). They are borg, controlled by their drive for expansion. If you can be a valuable ally against competing borg or help them consolidate a fragmented market, your business will flourish until you are no longer needed. These are the rules of the game.
There are some similarities, but there are even more differences. LLCs and startups are usually much smaller and their behaviour as a collectively entitity is much more dependent on the personal quirks of the founders/top management.
Nonprofits and governments are not driven by profit as a main motive and are in their own category.
Indeed they hate you and just may treat you like a dog too.
Here you have worked and toiled away for years trying to get your big break. Finally it comes and you get a phone call or invited out to the valley to demo/talk about selling your blood, sweat and tears. You then realize your just getting stomped on and they may have just stolen all your hard work. You think ...huh this is how it goes for the little guy innovator against this huge tech company you held in such high regard.
The tech world is not a extremely friendly place to even a ton of Caucasian guys(it's all about who you know/who is behind you), yet alone to any person who isn't!
An eeeeeexcellent reason to have non-primitive phone line systems. Do the "this call may be recorded for quality and assurance purposes yada yada" at the beginning before being hooked to a person on your side. You can make it sound unremarkable enough that they might not even notice it if you do it well enough.
Remember, Facebook et al. is the furthest thing from your friend, whether you're a facebook user or another thing in its ecosystem. Put your game face on when approaching or being approached by these companies. Document everything, because they will most likely end up f'ing you over.
edit: recording phone calls isn't just really good to protect yourself Facebook, it's also good for a whole array of other reasons. It captures synchronous information to keep note-taking easy, gives you a chance to look into everything a client requested/complained about and when when they brought it up, etc. tl;dr: get a proper phone system with recording abilities installed asap
This is just not realistic - in business if you tell everyone you're taping them when they call you, nobody is going to talk to you. You go out of business if nobody talks to you.
In any case, this discussion about phone calls is a side-show. If Twitter is going to cut you off from their API, you can't avoid that by not picking up their calls.
It's not a technical question, it's a legal question.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that recording phone calls without the other party's consent is outlawed explicitly by California law. So criteria like expectation of privacy don't come into play here.
I'm confused. Are you saying that recording a voice call without explicit consent in California is NOT illegal? Because I'm sure there are a lot of prosecutors and judges out there in CA who would disagree with you.
Modern devices already make a recording of the 'call' (it is fundamental to the working of the device).
Consent is explicit in choosing to use a device that is well-known to make recordings.
There is no expectation of privacy due to the explicit consent mentioned above and wide-spread allegations and revelations of US intelligence agencies and their affiliates and subsidiaries copying and storing Internet communications, as well as being able to 'listen in' on communications as they occur.
15 seconds of googling led me to section 632(a) of the California Penal Code. You could have done the same research yourself instead of promoting an incorrect understanding of the law and then asking that others do your homework for you.
>632. (a) Every person who, intentionally and without the consent of
all parties to a confidential communication, by means of any
electronic amplifying or recording device, eavesdrops upon or records
the confidential communication, whether the communication is carried
on among the parties in the presence of one another or by means of a
telegraph, telephone, or other device, except a radio, shall be
punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars
($2,500), or imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding one year,
or in the state prison, or by both that fine and imprisonment.
The one that explicitly exempts radio devices? The type of devices that modern cellular phones are?
And people are arguing about 'expectations of privacy' and 'explicit consent', when the actual statute uses 'confidential communication'? My phone calls are not confidential and they occur over radio devices.
Maybe you ought to keep reading through 632.6 and 632.7. Once you've read those, keep reading the entire thing plus the body of case law which explores these concepts and their practical applications. You're really doing yourself no favors arguing from ignorance and expecting others to do the research you're apparently too entitled to do yourself.
Google "two party consent states" and you'll learn why you are getting confused responses.
You are talking about "explicit consent" and "expectation of privacy" and so on that sound legalistic but have no meaning in this context, while ignoring the fact that there are laws, rulings, and precedent already on this issue.
>California's wiretapping law is a "two-party consent" law. California makes it a crime to record or eavesdrop on any confidential communication, including a private conversation or telephone call, without the consent of all parties to the conversation. See Cal. Penal Code § 632. The statute applies to "confidential communications" -- i.e., conversations in which one of the parties has an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation. See Flanagan v. Flanagan, 41 P.3d 575, 576-77, 578-82 (Cal. 2002). A California appellate court has ruled that this statute applies to the use of hidden video cameras to record conversations as well. See California v. Gibbons, 215 Cal. App. 3d 1204 (Cal Ct. App. 1989).
Emphasis mine.
It then follows with:
>If you are recording someone without their knowledge in a public or semi-public place like a street or restaurant, the person whom you're recording may or may not have "an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation," and the reasonableness of the expectation would depend on the particular factual circumstances. Therefore, you cannot necessarily assume that you are in the clear simply because you are in a public place.
Again, emphasis mine.
Your first link appears to confirm my claims and specifically contradicts what you claimed in your previous post.
You're confusing legal constraints and technical constraints.
Nobody's claiming that a phone doesn't create, transmit, and receive "recordings" in order to act like a phone. The pertinent question is whether/when you are allowed to make a recording of a phone call, for yourself, for whatever reason. You're being downvoted because you're missing the point.
You are completely right, I didn't think that the parent would delete it (it was a honest question, really). But I can't edit it now. Perhaps someone from HN can?
That was about FaceBook, but exactly the same holds here.
Quoting:
Certainly I'd be incorporating an exit strategy,
and my game plan would be to leverage off FB to
start with, to grow as fast as possible, develop
my own community and eco-system, and then be able
to shed FB and replace it with something else.
>Never, ever trust another company for your business model.
This is just another thought-terminating cliche not unlike "if it is free, you are a product" and I can't help but respond.
Large technological companies create ecosystems where smaller players can coexist with "hosts" in a mutually beneficial relationship. Ecosystem companies are not able to predict the future of the ecosystem, its evolution for all intents and purposes is mostly unpredictable. Sometimes the relationship works out, sometimes it doesn't.
Startups have 70-90% failure* rate, the possibility of the host cutting of some parts of the ecosystem to integrate their food chains into the corporate borg is factored in the business and investments strategies of the smaller companies.
You should not trust another company for your business model, but building your tech business in the ecosystem of a large fish is an absolutely valid and quite possibly lucrative strategy.
The problem is that there is nothing preventing the "ecosystem host" from deciding that a niche an "ecosystem player" is exploring is lucrative and worth pursuing.
You can fly under the radar for a while but if Twitter/Facebook/Google/etc decide your area is lucrative, they will go after it, whether that will kill one of their "ecosystem players" or not.
There is no partnership involved, they provide a service as a huge "blob" that is making them money and they don't care about 1 out of 1 million of their regular users. Your small company cannot call itself a partner, you've as much leverage as any user when it comes down to deciding to sacrifice you in the name of something else more lucrative.
I'd say explore the benefits to bootstrap but have a strategy to depend less and less on them or your time will come. And if you really want to tie your business survival to one of these ecosystems, get yours and theirs responsibility down in writing (and even that won't help much because a breach of contract for them will mean nothing in terms of dollars, while for you it'll be your existence).
Definitely. Indeed, there's a very long history of companies creating ecosystems and then crushing the most successful entrants. One that stuck with me is Stac:
In the MS DOS days they were looking at building on-the-fly compression chips for hard drives. But it turned out that it could be done nearly as well in software, so they made a very popular product that basically doubled the space available on every hard drive.
Microsoft thought that was pretty swell, so they talked with Stac about licensing their technology, getting as far as inspecting their source code. But they decided to just build it themselves. Stac eventually won a lawsuit on patent claims, but it was neither easy nor cheap.
It makes sense from an MBA perspective: you can definitely boost your short-term numbers by fucking over your previous partners. You get a proven market and no significant competition. But what never shows up on the spreadsheets is the extent to which you've reduced long-term ecosystem innovation because savvier players learn you can't be trusted.
If you build a great business based on something over
which you have no control, and which is such that the
ones who do have control actually may have an interest
in cloning what you do and terminating your facility
without warning, be sure to have a "Plan B".
Yes, sounds obvious, but so many people seem to ignore it, and in some cases actively disagree with it. You seem to be disagreeing with it - what would you suggest as more useful advice and a more reasonable stance?
Honestly, would you build a business based on a Twitter or Facebook facility, relying entirely on them not arbitrarily terminating your access?
Perhaps to realise these companies are walled garden abberations, and that in an open competitive world, the Eco system would exist but the monopoly would not.
As such encourage and build openness by default into your products, as for sure users want that (how many people for example wanted only to email other AOL users, or view only other AOL websites?
It's not a thought terminating cliche at all, it is very sound business advice and you will ignore it at your peril.
Not all that long ago I did tech dd on a company that had exactly one very large company as their main unwilling partner. They claimed that they were 'too big to fail', guess how that ended?
Yeah, Gnip founders ignored this "very sound business advice" and raked in ~$130M.
Startups are risky, startups that are growing in the ecosystem of one large megacorp are even riskier but they are prime acquisition targets. You decrease success chance for higher yields. This is like business 101.
The advice "do not base your business model on another company" evaluates to "do not increase your risks" which would be an absolutely absurd advice.
If one qualifies the original statement with several conditions for different contexts, it may become a solid advice. As it stands this model of understanding business strategies is useless.
But basing your business model on being allowed access to other companies' data fails far more frequently than that it succeeds, and it fails far more frequently than the already pretty bad chances that you have as a start-up to begin with.
See the thread subject that you're commenting in for how Gnip's competitor fared.
Yeah sure, the countless resellers of MSFT, Oracle, IBM, VMWare, Redhat, EMC all do not understand business at all. If only some of the uptards knew how little they know, yet how much they run their mouth.
I think you're mis-understanding the issue, but that's fine.
Let me try to explain it a bit better: if you use documented interfaces and have an established supplier role with a larger company that's fine. But if you are taking data from some API and you're re-purposing that data in a way that the company supplying you with that data may not agree with then you may one day find your access terminated.
You probably should not include RedHat in a list like that.
Which only re-inforces the statement, definitely does not detract from it. But normally speaking you write your contracts in such a way that one party can not unilaterally withdraw without serious penalties.
People will take any opportunity to stop thinking:
Most people would sooner die than
think; in fact, they do so.
-- Bertrand Russell
In short, if it's a "thought-terminating cliche" then the problem may not be in the way it's expressed, but in the way it's interpreted.
If someone chooses to terminate their thoughts based on something someone says, without considering why they might be saying it, and why there may be value to be extracted from it, then maybe the problem is not with the expression, but with them.
Think of it this way. You may consider it a given that there are times and places where you can and should trust other businesses. This statement about never, ever trusting a another business therefore seems to be at odds with your experience. Do you ignore it, or do you use it as an opportunity to learn why someone might say it?
1) Make an overgenaratilzation; 2) Get called out; 3) Make a defense, only to expose your overgeneralization yourself; 4) Get called out for it; 5) ???? 6) You're stuck in a loop.
Let's get back to an earlier question to help me understand your position. The original is:
Never, ever trust another company
for your business model.
In this comment[0] in response to a scenario wherein one company did trust another and got screwed you said:
What's wrong is the lack
of contract or agreement.
If a contract or agreement is required, then that would indicate that one should, indeed, not trust another company for one's business model. So it seems that you agree with the actual statement.
What's wrong is the lack of contract or agreement. If you jump on a business opportunity without formal contracts, it's your own fault. Generally speaking, if defense and risk mitigation is not your first thought when evaluating opportunities, you probably should stick to applying your technical skills, working for people who understand those things.
But of course, MBAs are for suckers who know nothing and should just cease to exist. At least that's what I keep hearing on HN.
Never, ever *trust* a company: always have
formal contracts. If you can't get formal
contracts, don't work with them or rely on
them.
That seems to match what I said, which was:
Never, ever trust another company
for your business model.
You seem to be saying exactly the same thing. You seem to be saying: Put formal contracts in place. If you trust someone then you don't need formal contracts. If you need formal contracts, you don't trust them.
Am I missing something?
It really does seem to me that we have pretty much exactly the same viewpoint - there is a risk analysis to be done, and risk mitigation is critical. My risk analysis says that if someone else is in a position to screw you over completely, don't proceed on blind faith. Instead, have contracts or agreements in place. In other words:
Don't trust them.
We're back to what I originally said. Do you disagree with it? It seems like you're actually in complete agreement.
If you read carefully the discussion, you will see that my point is not that what you said is untrue. My point is that what you said is a "thought-terminating cliche". It's a over-simplified one-liner. Just look at how much had to be written in order for it to be more clear and valid. There is no trust in business relationships. How do you trust a legal entity? The people there change all the time, goals become misaligned, etc.
And if you look at the comment wherein I used that single line, I then went on to add this:
Certainly I'd be incorporating an exit strategy,
and my game plan would be to leverage off FB to
start with, to grow as fast as possible, develop
my own community and eco-system, and then be able
to shed FB and replace it with something else.
Is that not enough of an expansion of the thought, pointing out that using FB (or whoever) is valid to start with provided you have some sort of exit strategy?
I disagree that it's a "thought-terminating cliche" - it certainly shouldn't be. There's a difference between trusting someone, versus using them to your advantage but having an exit strategy.
I agree entirely that there is value, sometimes significant, in exploiting the ecosystem created by a larger fish. You'll see that in my comment, wherein it says:
... leverage off XXXX to
start with ... be able
to shed [it] and replace
it with something else.
You are saying the same thing I've said, but emphasizing that starting in the jaws of a larger fish is sometimes worth doing, and sometimes they'll deign to let you survive there.
Consider, though. If you become successful - which is surely your aim - then you will come to their attention, and they will do whatever they like.
So I repeat: Don't trust them. Use them, yes, but don't trust them.
I think this needs more detail as to what stage in the tech lifecycle the businesses are in.
Obviously, I'm going to trust an electricity company to provide my business with electricity. I'm even going to trust laptop manufacturers to continue to provide laptops I can code on.
In both those cases, the thing I'm depending on is a commodity, where there is also either strong competition or regulation. There isn't much risk in depending on them.
The stage to be wary of is when a whole industry is still at product stage and people are trying to move them into being platforms, or using them to Innovate/Leverage/Commoditise (ILC, see Simon Wardley) to play ecosystem games.
i.e. Where the business models and how the industry will be vertically and horizontally sliced are not yet settled.
Those are the ones you should be wary of dependence on.
Sometimes trust is essential and diversifying would be a loosing strategy as the larger partner will react specifically to your diversification but will help develop your business until you are not looking for something on the side. Generic business strategy rules don't work anymore, the conditions are changing too fast.
I agree, however, that blind trust is always a bad path.
Allowing your business model be beholden to the whims of another company is setting yourself up for failure. Sure using an ecosystem built by another company can be a great way to gain traction but by limiting yourself to this ecosystem you are also severely limiting your growth potential. Not only that but you will be easily and quickly dispersed with when you become successful enough. Having validated your idea the larger eco-system company will simply replace you with a clone that they own. Unless you have some serious in-house advantage (patents and people) that is not easily replicated then you will fail.
There's always risk but it varies greatly by platform. Twitter is by now notorious for doing this behavior. On the other hand Apple has a flourishing ecosystem of app developers. And FB has improved greatly moving from being Twitter like to closer to Apple.
It's a function of maturity (young startups have growing pains on what they want to be and how they monetize) which can definitely create collateral damage. Mature companies like Apple don't experience the same degree of angsnt.
It's no accident that Twitter, which has generally underperformed and disappointed more than its peers, is still screwing up and over its ecosystem far more than others.
Or be acquired by the larger ecosystem company what would be the desired endgame for many startups. This alone may be worth all the risk of being squeezed out of the market.
> You should not trust another company for your business model, but building your tech business in the ecosystem of a large fish is an absolutely valid and quite possibly lucrative strategy
Yes, as long as if you have a Plan B if/when your relationship is cut (a valid Plan B is to close shop and try to do something else with the expertise gained)
I've worked for small companies in the past that had dozens of partners, but most partnerships don't really do anything except give you brand logo to mutually share on each other's web pages.
It's like anything else, partners provide revenue to you following a power-law distribution, with a long-tail that provides nothing and a very select few that make up the lion's share.
I was involved in a company that heavily depended on a popular site's API. We could clearly see they thought of the API's best value for them as filling in features before they had time to create them, and as a testing ground for ideas. It became harder and harder to stay ahead as our business grew, as at any time our features could be replaced with an official version. We decided to stop development.
Now, a few years later our largest competitor has been doing quite well with a product along the same style... but now, without warning, they've been cut off from API access and are facing requests for hundreds of refunds. Glad it wasn't us.
At ScraperWiki, we had our Twitter to spreadsheet tool cut off (at a much more modest size!). I wrote up an analysis of where you can get Twitter data from and why which is relevant:
> He said that before this, the pair had been discussing a renewal of the deal.
This should be a case study for anybody looking to get into a BD role.
A partnership is fundamentally coming from a position of weakness, and the relationship is a way for both partners to partially fill in whatever gap they believe they have in their strategy.
Sometimes partnerships go south, especially when the relationship is highly asymmetric.
In this case Twitter was the stronger of the two partners and they decided not to renew. That sucks, but that's life. Don't build your entire business around a single partnership, because that signals to your partner that all they have to do to get rid of you is replicate what you do and cut you off. Once you've gone through the blood sweat and tears to prove the market, you've just given your larger partner free market development.
DataSift's website lists a number of data sources [1], but Twitter comes up first. More importantly, I suspect these sources are slightly massaged to look like they have more sources coming in than are really useful for their business model. e.g. is Wikipedia really in the same space as Twitter? They also have a bunch of minor sources but they're listed like they all rank equally. This is fine, most businesses would do the same to make themselves look better -- it's just advertising.
Another part of business partnerships is that you have to expose your weakness to your partner. Twitter is going to know at some point that DataSift's business model is heavily built around their firehose. They might even have some sense about what volume of business all the rest of those sources makes up to DataSift's business. Twitter also, through their other partnerships, has a better sense of the size of the Twitter Analytics market. Even if DataSift's piece is 15% of the overall market, Twitter has other partners it can use to get a feel for the other 85%.
Partnerships are dangerous. Know what you're getting into before you get into them, and try to only do them with similar-sized partners or you'll find yourself getting screwed over/screwing somebody else over.
Twitter is quickly approaching the point where it has lost my goodwill and I will actively look for something to replace it. (Apple has already passed that point)
I understand the way big ecosystems and walled gardens work. I also understand that every large technology company that has come down the pike in the last 30 years has wanted to conquer the known universe. That does not mean I have to actively assist them in this activity.
I'm losing faith that this is a viable approach. For example, laptops are a domain where your options are Apple, Lenovo, Dell, or a company that whose future in the laptop market is bleak. All of the options have done goodwill losing things in the past.
Can't we all just "conquer the known universe" together? We need a framework for educating these companies that open solutions have greater reach than closed solutions even if they are less directly profitable. The people making decisions are often successful enough this should be possible.
I am not sure these companies don't actually already know "open solutions have greater reach than closed solutions". They are run by extremely smart and capable people - but they are more concerned with pleasing the shareholders and hence short term profits than creating truly open systems (with some exceptions here and there) and we can't blame them for it. A more effective approach would be to create/support open systems and educate consumers instead.
I have no idea if DataSift and NTT were good partners, but not having anyone else access the Firehose suggests they think they can cover all significant use-cases. This almost always turns out to be wrong.
It also sends another chilling signal to say "we're a platform, but when we feel we want to roll over part of the ecosystem we'll do it".
Gnip was DataSift's biggest competitor, and Twitter acquired Gnip. So firehose access is still totally available, but only through Twitter itself (b/c of the Gnip acquisition).
When the big company you relies on buys your competitor, you should be very, very scared.
It's not like Twitter can't offer some slower Firehose or more advanced filtering or whatever. Or offer some EC2 images to spin up to handle it.
It's only 500M items a day. At that level you've got plenty of options as far as hardware and software. (You could even record it into a normalass SQL DB to log each one if you wanted.) You may need some useful buffering for high spikes, perhaps some message queues with lots of RAM.
Why? A couple years ago I was running a telecom, and we had around that volume of calls a day. Each call required not only routing instructions that hit several DBs, but also a transactional INSERT/UPDATE to account balances. Single node SQL Server handled it fine. (Though it was less than optimal at doing non-OLTP stuff.)
Twitter can handle this for people (like DataSift, providing historical lookback), or they can provide template to help them spin up. It's not gonna cost thousands of dollars a month in hardware.
It's great for companies like Twitter and Facebook when startups build on their platform. The startups innovate and experiment with new features and business models (at their founders' and investors' expense). The lousy ideas fail, the good ones survive and the platform owner can cherry-pick by either replicating the successful feature/business model themselves or buying their favourite.
Then, by cutting off others' access to the platform, the platform owner can make their own service a monopoly and capture a significant proportion (if not all) of the others' customers and revenues.
It was of benefit to Twitter because they got to find out whether or not there was a market for the "enhancements and cleaned up API niceities" that DataSift (and Gnip) offered, without needing to invest in it themselves.
DataSift and Gnip had access to the Twitter firehose (every single tweet posted, live). Normal businesses / developers can't get access to that. Twitter's "streaming" API is a tiny fraction of the firehose.
So DataSift wasn't just reselling their data - they, along with Gnip, had a partnership that allowed them to get access to the firehose. For many social media companies, the firehose is a necessity, so they bought contracts with Gnip or DataSift.
Then Twitter bought Gnip, and is cutting off DataSift's access to the firehose.
Right so if we say Gnip is Twitter, then anyone can go buy data from Twitter (even if it's a wholly owned subcompany).
DataSift didn't have much of a value add (OK, historical data, common filters for Twitter and Reddit and others, etc.) But nothing that Twitter can't just in-house now that the market got nice and established.
Yes. Having acquired Gnip, Twitter can now offer the same services that DataSift offers.
So, Twitter terminates their "partnership" with DataSift, and all of DataSift's customers (i.e. the market that DataSift spent money and effort getting "nice and established", educating potential customers, helping them figure out how to make use of the data, etc.) who want to continue benefitting from those services will now migrate to Twitter/Gnip.
I bet Twitter/Gnip will come out with some tool to make it ultra-easy for DataSift's customers to migrate across.
I was once invited to be a co-founder of a startup (by the other founder), whose business model was to build something using the API of <insert-big-social-network-company-here>. I declined, for the same sort of reasons mentioned in this comment by georgemcbay - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9364391 - i.e. "yes, this fact should really give pause to people who are thinking about basing an entire company around an API, portal or other service that is 100% controlled by a large company. Any such dependency should be seen as the huge risk factor that it is."
Anyone doing business with Twitter is a fool. There are few companies that show as much disdain to their partners as Twitter does. With partners like these, who needs enemies?
For all the great things going on in open source software, truly open source data isn't all that common. I love playing around with third party APIs as much as anyone but as software developers we need to be extra careful that we are not building on sand. Just the thought of being cut off limits lots of interesting ideas and side projects for me. In some ways I want to build a platform just to get 100% access to some really fun data thrown off from the platform in which to build fun things on top of.
Talking to Nick Halstead, the CEO and founder of DataSift, he said that his company was “blindsided” by Twitter’s announcement, which it made without any warning to DataSift.
He should have totally seen it coming and been prepared. When you don't think about the future and don't have the foresight to build competencies to take advantage of what you discover, you end up being blindsided. This is not about hating on Twitter or siding with them, it's pure competition.
I researched this last summer. Even before I was explicitly told all the original firehose contracts were five years long, I could infer it from attitudes and behaviours.
I'm excited that Datasift are launching interesting new Facebook features. They're a great company, with good technology.
I hope Twitter's "no data resale" attitude leads to them becoming irrelevant, as it is so destructive of much innovation.
Yeah, I'm sure it was significant source of talk within the company for a while. But what can you do? It's not like there are other Twitters out there. The value of Twitter is that there's only one. It looks and sounds like they're trying to diversify out to other sources, but none-of-them are Twitter and for whatever reason Tweets are like crack to market research firms.
Well, Instagram and Twitter are converging in terms of feature set. They're pretty well indistinguishable now.
They've not totally converged in terms of audience, but I think have surprising overlaps. Lots of Twitter data use cases you can get from Instagram, I bet.
Well, Instagram and Twitter are converging in terms of feature set. They're pretty well indistinguishable now.
I don't see how that's true at all. While Twitter now has well-developed image capabilities it's still not the core of what people use it for. Also Instagram has no equivalent of retweets.
And Facebook/Instagram has no official data policy, right? They don't offer paid data from what I can see. You can sign up as a dev, email them if you need more access, otherwise...?
So as far as data access goes, Twitter and FB/Instagram are pretty much on the same page. Except Twitter's docs are way more accurate and nicer, probably because it makes money for them and isn't a "throw it out there and see what happens" kinda thing.
>I hope Twitter's "no data resale" attitude leads to them becoming irrelevant, as it is so destructive of much innovation.
Are you serious? As in, do you honestly believe that end users are gonna say "what, Twitter won't let people have access to 'our data'? Screw that I'm gonna go to ... <some competitor I've not heard of>?"
I think the actual answer is implied by the last clause of the sentence you quote.
Twitter gained a lot early on from having all sorts of innovative things happen on top of their APIs. They clearly believe that's irrelevant now, as they have energetically screwed over all sorts of API users. I think the hope is that users will gradually say, "Oh, I love cool tool X for competitor Y; I'll switch."
I don't think it will happen next week, but it's a plausible path to long-term failure. Missing important waves of innovation is how a lot of tech companies die.
Can you list some X and Ys that exist or have existed? I don't use social media at all (except when people link to G+ or Twitter from HN). But looking around, I don't see anyone offering the same kind of service as Twitter. And even last month, didn't they just offer video streaming, right around the time Meerkat got to market? So it's unsure that they need 3rd parties.
Twitters got how many thousands of employees? Surely if they organize well they can innovate inside. Or just keep an ear to the ground and hear about neat-sounding things and clone them. Or buy them if they have to.
What value add did DataSift bring? They were taking 80% of the revenue. If those DataSift customers were really using the Twitter firehose, there's no real replacement. That means Twitter just upped revenues on those customers by 400%.
You mean X and Y for Twitter in the future? It's impossible for me to say; if I could, it wouldn't be particularly innovative.
Historically, though, platforms die all the time. AOL and Compuserve lost out because they couldn't innovate at anything like the speed of the open web.
I don't think they need third parties immediately. They needed them in the past, though; they were important to Twitter's early success. They'll need them again at some point, too.
The notion that companies can innovate because a) they want to innovate, and b) they have lots of people is... unproven. How many years has Yahoo been floundering now? What's the last innovative thing Microsoft did? Does IBM even exist anymore? Lots of large companies open innovation centers and intrapreneurship programs. Small companies still regularly kill large ones. That's because large companies are mainly optimized for turning the crank on their current money machine. Things that interfere with that rarely survive, including most innovation efforts.
We have been working with DataSift for about a year now though and it is pretty damn clunky. I'd say GNIP is probably even worse at the moment but maybe not for long?
As a user, if GNIP can capitalize on being part of Twitter, I gladly welcome the improvements this could bring. I'm not super confident though as now Twitter/GNIP will also be a monopoly in the space with the usual disincentives that come along with that. Also, our use case is strongly biased towards the "historic query" features and neither service seems as interested in that as they are in the real time streaming features.
Also, I had considered earlier developing a niche competitor solely focused on the historics space for companies with research-oriented use cases like ours. I suspected Twitter would be dropping this hammer though so glad I didn't waste my time!
I wonder if using the hundreds if not thousands of twitter api credentials checked in on public repos, one could mitigate against things like this?
Though I suspect companies not in the jurisdiction of the US or its "partners" will probably be more likely to get away with an approach like this if caught or public about it, while still providing value added services based on walled gardens like facebook and twitter.
That's not surprising. Twitter is very controlling about their service. They had an open API only until they got market share. Then the jaws gradually closed on Twitter-related programs. Twitter strongly discourages client programs other than their own. I once wrote a Twitter client with spam and ad blocking, just to see what it would be like, but I knew Twitter would never approve it.
I hope some of the people got good salaries. And maybe got some of the almost $80M raised.
DataSift was proud of the money they raised. The said it made them "more difficult to acquire than Gnip". I was amazed when I heard that. It sounds like they are happy they took on so much money and were moved passed by Gnip.
But it is worse, I think. For many services they require you to provide API keys. Rate limits are a problem? No! Create more API keys and give them us. Why are they not blocked? If any big service decides to block API key rotation ... game over? If we do it in-house, then we can use many proxies and pretend to be separate. Maybe.
Or maybe not. Maybe because of VC connection DataSift can rotate API keys and with impunity. Who knows?
But yes, to me it is very very risky business, but not too difficult technology. (Maybe that is why I have not had a big hit. Too little risk.)
So does HN think it is successful to raise money like them? Do the founders make more than $500K/year total from this venture?
Their strategy to handle this business risk was to ...accept it? It seems kind of shortsighted given twitter has ALREADY did a version of this to a bunch of other companies/apps.
At it's core, what twitter provides is no big deal. The ability to post 140 chars. They could have been quietly funding an open twitter protocol (it will happen eventually) but they chose to keep their heads in the sand.
This doesn't surprise me at all. If you are going to use the infrastructure of an existing business to start your own, you will need to have a plan for figuring out other sources of users and diversifying your risk. Otherwise, you will be out of business if you ever get too big or you do something that the larger business disapproves of.
Both of those services are still alive - seems a little bit silly to say they "weren't successful" unless your definition of success means having as many users as Twitter.
2010 - After switching to a game model and doing quite well - neck and neck with Zynga. We were walked into a Facebook meeting room and told a bizarre story how Mark was upset about friend feed forms. They explained that we could only share (by means of post feed forms) our games with people that already had our games. Pleading did nothing, they ended that model. Zynaga is still flailing around.
2012 - I changed companies and focused on mobile advertising. Another decent path with 12 employees or so. We got a phone call . [EDIT REMOVED REST OF STORY]
2015 - I received another phone call from a large company (They deal in search) . I wont go into this one.
* Phone calls from large companies are extremely bad. That means they don't want things in writing.
So sure, have fun with working with large companies. Just remember one thing: they hate you.