Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
hi dewald. we obviously feel that users want the most relevant tweets first (the use of popular is unfortunate here). and the web interface of search.twitter.com has begun an evolution in that direction. it's still unclear what Twitter is going to do with the API (hence the silence), however, to go with your argument: time indexed search is, potentially, something a third party service could do. we do provide the streaming API to get much-better-than-search-real-time results. On Apr 6, 2010, at 4:28 AM, Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com wrote: Raffi, Tweet id is a no-brainer. We understand that an linear incrementing number does not scale because at some point it must cycle back to 1. Search is a different animal. When I do a Twitter search, I expect your system to tell me what is *happening* right now. I am NOT expecting your system to tell me what is *popular* right now. This popular tweet thing is diluting and violating your entire mission of real-time. If I search for earthquake I want to see what is *happening* in real- time. I have no interest in seeing a 30-minute old tweet from @aplusk or @ev just because they are trusted accounts and the tweet is being retweeted a lot (to simplify the popularity algorithm). If people have a need to see popular tweets, you know what? That is an ideal service to be provided by a third-party developer/service. Twitter is real-time, and has defined real-time information. Stick to it. Don't dilute your mission. On Apr 6, 1:03 am, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: we have the developer advocate we want, but, of course, please feel free to reach out to taylor with your concerns and what you would like him to do to help you all out. i'm sure he would welcome the help. as for what's going on behind the scenes, i'll describe it out as so: - tweet ID generation - this is a pure scalability problem that lays at the heart of twitter being able to grow. unless i'm mistaken, in the end, a centralized way of generating tweet IDs that are strictly increasing by one does not scale. the method that we generate tweet IDs, and therefore the IDs themselves, will, almost probably, have to change. - popular tweets in search - twitter is increasingly being relied upon to be the place for relevant real-time information. most end-users would say that a time indexed search stream is not as valuable. as you all can probably tell, keeping a real time search index operational is hard enough, but imagine keeping a service running that is simultaneously delivering relevant results along with time indexed results. that's significantly harder. those are the issues facing us. as i said, please bear with us -- once we have weighed all these issues internally, we will of course, let everybody know. we've heard the concerns, but, if there are new ones, please let us know! On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 8:28 PM, Orian Marx (@orian) or...@orianmarx.comwrote: Raffi, one of the things that really stands out for me in what you are saying here is that there are lots of moving pieces that the team is trying to align quickly. The question is, who and what is dictating the schedule? I get the sense that all the recent changes are parts of a bigger picture plan for Twitter, but the reality is that Twitter HQ has not conveyed a real sense of this bigger picture to the developer community - and it certainly hasn't conveyed why these recent changes need to align quickly. So inevitably the situation at hand seems to be that some serious developer concerns effectively need to be pushed aside in order to meet some internal goals of Twitter that have not been made public. I can understand that as a choice that Twitter management might make. What I think would be unreasonable would be for Twitter to expect the developer community to not push back. I think it's pretty clear that the developer advocate concept needs to be fleshed out more, and i'll try to push for that at Chirp. If anyone else is interested in helping make that discussion productive, lets get started :-) On Apr 5, 8:45 pm, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: to clarify (from my personal view), what taylor has provided to the team is a clear view into what developers want / think / feel -- basically, a pulse on the developer community. he's doing a fine job. and for these particular issues, not only has he conveyed the feelings of our community, but everybody on the team has also heard it personally. i hope we have more to say about both these topics soon. as you can all imagine, there is a myriad of moving pieces that we are all trying to get to align quickly -- there are technical issues, there are the concerns of our developer and user community, and then, of course, there are the overall objectives of Twitter, Inc. getting them all to align is, at times, ridiculously
RE: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
But raffi why do you have to break the old to offer the new? Basically I've just updated MyPostButler to work again after your last unannounced changed the Thursday evening before a holiday break only to open my email this morning and see you are going to modify search api yet again in some undetermined period of time. I understand things need to change from time to time BUT why so often? Why cant you make the new changes opt-in rather than breaking all the previous applications already deployed out there. Regards, Dean Collins Cognation Inc d...@cognation.net +1-212-203-4357 New York +61-2-9016-5642 (Sydney in-dial). +44-20-3129-6001 (London in-dial). -Original Message- From: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com [mailto:twitter-development- t...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Raffi Krikorian Sent: Tuesday, 6 April 2010 8:48 AM To: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com Cc: Twitter Development Talk Subject: Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt- in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available) hi dewald. we obviously feel that users want the most relevant tweets first (the use of popular is unfortunate here). and the web interface of search.twitter.com has begun an evolution in that direction. it's still unclear what Twitter is going to do with the API (hence the silence), however, to go with your argument: time indexed search is, potentially, something a third party service could do. we do provide the streaming API to get much-better-than-search-real-time results. On Apr 6, 2010, at 4:28 AM, Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com wrote: Raffi, Tweet id is a no-brainer. We understand that an linear incrementing number does not scale because at some point it must cycle back to 1. Search is a different animal. When I do a Twitter search, I expect your system to tell me what is *happening* right now. I am NOT expecting your system to tell me what is *popular* right now. This popular tweet thing is diluting and violating your entire mission of real-time. If I search for earthquake I want to see what is *happening* in real- time. I have no interest in seeing a 30-minute old tweet from @aplusk or @ev just because they are trusted accounts and the tweet is being retweeted a lot (to simplify the popularity algorithm). If people have a need to see popular tweets, you know what? That is an ideal service to be provided by a third-party developer/service. Twitter is real-time, and has defined real-time information. Stick to it. Don't dilute your mission. On Apr 6, 1:03 am, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: we have the developer advocate we want, but, of course, please feel free to reach out to taylor with your concerns and what you would like him to do to help you all out. i'm sure he would welcome the help. as for what's going on behind the scenes, i'll describe it out as so: - tweet ID generation - this is a pure scalability problem that lays at the heart of twitter being able to grow. unless i'm mistaken, in the end, a centralized way of generating tweet IDs that are strictly increasing by one does not scale. the method that we generate tweet IDs, and therefore the IDs themselves, will, almost probably, have to change. - popular tweets in search - twitter is increasingly being relied upon to be the place for relevant real-time information. most end-users would say that a time indexed search stream is not as valuable. as you all can probably tell, keeping a real time search index operational is hard enough, but imagine keeping a service running that is simultaneously delivering relevant results along with time indexed results. that's significantly harder. those are the issues facing us. as i said, please bear with us -- once we have weighed all these issues internally, we will of course, let everybody know. we've heard the concerns, but, if there are new ones, please let us know! On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 8:28 PM, Orian Marx (@orian) or...@orianmarx.comwrote: Raffi, one of the things that really stands out for me in what you are saying here is that there are lots of moving pieces that the team is trying to align quickly. The question is, who and what is dictating the schedule? I get the sense that all the recent changes are parts of a bigger picture plan for Twitter, but the reality is that Twitter HQ has not conveyed a real sense of this bigger picture to the developer community - and it certainly hasn't conveyed why these recent changes need to align quickly. So inevitably the situation at hand seems to be that some serious developer concerns effectively need to be pushed aside in order to meet some internal goals of Twitter that have not been made public. I can understand that as a
RE: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
I think twitter forget that API developers are there customers as well, not end users. At the end of the day if this make my app unviable then you'll lose this development community as a developer and pretty improbable to ever get us back. I've never funded another application on the Adobe FMS platform after they dropped the 10 seat license and killed the business I funded 7 months of development on. they are dead to me - should I really be adding Twitter to that list? anyone here still developing apps for Friendster? Yes Twitter it can happen that fast. Regards, Dean Collins Cognation Inc d...@cognation.net +1-212-203-4357 New York +61-2-9016-5642 (Sydney in-dial). +44-20-3129-6001 (London in-dial). -Original Message- From: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com [mailto:twitter-development- t...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Dewald Pretorius Sent: Tuesday, 6 April 2010 9:12 AM To: Twitter Development Talk Subject: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available) Raffi, We obviously feel that users want the most relevant tweets first. Has this been determined and confirmed with user focus groups, or is this just an opinion that originated somewhere in a Twitter office or meeting room? I am one of those users, and I have just told you that I have no interest in seeing old tweets, regardless of how popular or relevant they deem to be by your algorithms. When I search Twitter (and I'm making this statement as a user of search.twitter.com, not as an API consumer) I want to see in real-time what is happening right now. That is why I am using search.twitter.com and not google.com for that purpose. If you're going to rather show relevant tweets, then I will instead use Google because their matching algorithms are far more advanced and mature. On Apr 6, 9:47 am, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: hi dewald. we obviously feel that users want the most relevant tweets first (the use of popular is unfortunate here). and the web interface of search.twitter.com has begun an evolution in that direction. it's still unclear what Twitter is going to do with the API (hence the silence), however, to go with your argument: time indexed search is, potentially, something a third party service could do. we do provide the streaming API to get much-better-than-search-real-time results. On Apr 6, 2010, at 4:28 AM, Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com wrote: Raffi, Tweet id is a no-brainer. We understand that an linear incrementing number does not scale because at some point it must cycle back to 1. Search is a different animal. When I do a Twitter search, I expect your system to tell me what is *happening* right now. I am NOT expecting your system to tell me what is *popular* right now. This popular tweet thing is diluting and violating your entire mission of real-time. If I search for earthquake I want to see what is *happening* in real- time. I have no interest in seeing a 30-minute old tweet from @aplusk or @ev just because they are trusted accounts and the tweet is being retweeted a lot (to simplify the popularity algorithm). If people have a need to see popular tweets, you know what? That is an ideal service to be provided by a third-party developer/service. Twitter is real-time, and has defined real-time information. Stick to it. Don't dilute your mission. On Apr 6, 1:03 am, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: we have the developer advocate we want, but, of course, please feel free to reach out to taylor with your concerns and what you would like him to do to help you all out. i'm sure he would welcome the help. as for what's going on behind the scenes, i'll describe it out as so: - tweet ID generation - this is a pure scalability problem that lays at the heart of twitter being able to grow. unless i'm mistaken, in the end, a centralized way of generating tweet IDs that are strictly increasing by one does not scale. the method that we generate tweet IDs, and therefore the IDs themselves, will, almost probably, have to change. - popular tweets in search - twitter is increasingly being relied upon to be the place for relevant real-time information. most end-users would say that a time indexed search stream is not as valuable. as you all can probably tell, keeping a real time search index operational is hard enough, but imagine keeping a service running that is simultaneously delivering relevant results along with time indexed results. that's significantly harder. those are the issues facing us. as i said, please bear with us -- once we have weighed all these issues internally, we will of course, let everybody know.
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
Doesn't this always happen? Paths diverge (usually around money but sometimes around principle) and then it gives rise to something new? Allan Hoving http://www.thefrequency.tv On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com wrote: Raffi, Tweet id is a no-brainer. We understand that an linear incrementing number does not scale because at some point it must cycle back to 1. Search is a different animal. When I do a Twitter search, I expect your system to tell me what is *happening* right now. I am NOT expecting your system to tell me what is *popular* right now. This popular tweet thing is diluting and violating your entire mission of real-time. If I search for earthquake I want to see what is *happening* in real- time. I have no interest in seeing a 30-minute old tweet from @aplusk or @ev just because they are trusted accounts and the tweet is being retweeted a lot (to simplify the popularity algorithm). If people have a need to see popular tweets, you know what? That is an ideal service to be provided by a third-party developer/service. Twitter is real-time, and has defined real-time information. Stick to it. Don't dilute your mission. On Apr 6, 1:03 am, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: we have the developer advocate we want, but, of course, please feel free to reach out to taylor with your concerns and what you would like him to do to help you all out. i'm sure he would welcome the help. as for what's going on behind the scenes, i'll describe it out as so: - tweet ID generation - this is a pure scalability problem that lays at the heart of twitter being able to grow. unless i'm mistaken, in the end, a centralized way of generating tweet IDs that are strictly increasing by one does not scale. the method that we generate tweet IDs, and therefore the IDs themselves, will, almost probably, have to change. - popular tweets in search - twitter is increasingly being relied upon to be the place for relevant real-time information. most end-users would say that a time indexed search stream is not as valuable. as you all can probably tell, keeping a real time search index operational is hard enough, but imagine keeping a service running that is simultaneously delivering relevant results along with time indexed results. that's significantly harder. those are the issues facing us. as i said, please bear with us -- once we have weighed all these issues internally, we will of course, let everybody know. we've heard the concerns, but, if there are new ones, please let us know! On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 8:28 PM, Orian Marx (@orian) or...@orianmarx.com wrote: Raffi, one of the things that really stands out for me in what you are saying here is that there are lots of moving pieces that the team is trying to align quickly. The question is, who and what is dictating the schedule? I get the sense that all the recent changes are parts of a bigger picture plan for Twitter, but the reality is that Twitter HQ has not conveyed a real sense of this bigger picture to the developer community - and it certainly hasn't conveyed why these recent changes need to align quickly. So inevitably the situation at hand seems to be that some serious developer concerns effectively need to be pushed aside in order to meet some internal goals of Twitter that have not been made public. I can understand that as a choice that Twitter management might make. What I think would be unreasonable would be for Twitter to expect the developer community to not push back. I think it's pretty clear that the developer advocate concept needs to be fleshed out more, and i'll try to push for that at Chirp. If anyone else is interested in helping make that discussion productive, lets get started :-) On Apr 5, 8:45 pm, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: to clarify (from my personal view), what taylor has provided to the team is a clear view into what developers want / think / feel -- basically, a pulse on the developer community. he's doing a fine job. and for these particular issues, not only has he conveyed the feelings of our community, but everybody on the team has also heard it personally. i hope we have more to say about both these topics soon. as you can all imagine, there is a myriad of moving pieces that we are all trying to get to align quickly -- there are technical issues, there are the concerns of our developer and user community, and then, of course, there are the overall objectives of Twitter, Inc. getting them all to align is, at times, ridiculously difficult. On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com wrote: To be fair to Taylor, we may be expecting too much from his role. When reading the job description of a
RE: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
Ha ha, love it. I feel sorry for other developers, for me personally I can walk away from my app at anytime as I see fit because I'm not reliant on any single project. lol MyPostButler (or MyTwitterButler as it was known back then) was given away for the first few months - It was just a byproduct for www.LiveBaseballChat.com - it was only when I was flooded for licenses I decided to charge for it. I guess I'm also at a disadvantage as I don't personally code anything and just pay other people to build apps for me so 'any' change is a pita on an roi basis. Regards, Dean Collins Cognation Inc d...@cognation.net +1-212-203-4357 New York +61-2-9016-5642 (Sydney in-dial). +44-20-3129-6001 (London in-dial). -Original Message- From: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com [mailto:twitter-development- t...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Dewald Pretorius Sent: Tuesday, 6 April 2010 9:42 AM To: Twitter Development Talk Subject: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available) Dean, sarcasm lines line rel=meSome developers have too much time on their hands./ line lineSo, Twitter make these changes to give them something to do so that they can STFU on these forums, because they are too busy chasing the latest API mod./line /lines /sarcasm On Apr 6, 10:14 am, Dean Collins d...@cognation.net wrote: But raffi why do you have to break the old to offer the new? Basically I've just updated MyPostButler to work again after your last unannounced changed the Thursday evening before a holiday break only to open my email this morning and see you are going to modify search api yet again in some undetermined period of time. I understand things need to change from time to time BUT why so often? Why cant you make the new changes opt-in rather than breaking all the previous applications already deployed out there. Regards, Dean Collins Cognation Inc d...@cognation.net +1-212-203-4357 New York +61-2-9016-5642 (Sydney in-dial). +44-20-3129-6001 (London in-dial). -- To unsubscribe, reply using remove me as the subject.
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
- Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: hi dewald. we obviously feel that users want the most relevant tweets first (the use of popular is unfortunate here). and the web interface of search.twitter.com has begun an evolution in that direction. it's still unclear what Twitter is going to do with the API (hence the silence), however, to go with your argument: time indexed search is, potentially, something a third party service could do. we do provide the streaming API to get much-better-than-search-real-time results. Yes, and the real-time work I'm doing I do with Streaming. Building your own time indexed search on top of Streaming, however, has an *extensive* investment requirement on the part of said third-party services. You've got Firehose-scale bandwidth requirements, Cassandra-scale persistence requirements, and Hadoop-scale algorithmic requirements just for openers. It's an *extremely* competitive marketplace. Hell, there are profitable businesses out there *giving away* Twitter-based services. You've got to be compelling, cheap, correct, pretty and fast out of the box to compete with them. You can't make it work, then make it pretty, go sell it and then make it scale any more. Using Streaming in its current state means duplicating large chunks of Twitter's infrastructure. That's inefficient, and off the top of my head, I can't think of a *single* example of an inefficient business that survived in the long run. -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky borasky-research.net @znmeb A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. ~ Paul Erdős
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
- Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com wrote: Raffi, Tweet id is a no-brainer. We understand that an linear incrementing number does not scale because at some point it must cycle back to 1. Search is a different animal. When I do a Twitter search, I expect your system to tell me what is *happening* right now. I am NOT expecting your system to tell me what is *popular* right now. This popular tweet thing is diluting and violating your entire mission of real-time. If I search for earthquake I want to see what is *happening* in real- time. I have no interest in seeing a 30-minute old tweet from @aplusk or @ev just because they are trusted accounts and the tweet is being retweeted a lot (to simplify the popularity algorithm). If people have a need to see popular tweets, you know what? That is an ideal service to be provided by a third-party developer/service. Twitter is real-time, and has defined real-time information. Stick to it. Don't dilute your mission. +1000 And can we fix Trending Topics too? Give me the Top 100 or Top 200 or even Top 1000 and let me filter out Tiger Woods, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and the iPad! ;-) -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky http://borasky-research.net/smart-at-znmeb A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. ~ Paul Erdős
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
If you have no interest in seeing old tweets then pass the parameter that indicates that you want to strictly see the most recent tweets (the legacy behavior). You get what you want and those who are interested in more signal amongst the ever increasing noise can find out the moderately-less-recent-but-most-popular results associated with their search term. You represent one desired use case. There are others. We are providing a mechanism to get one, the other or both. Choose whichever you like. On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 6:11 AM, Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com wrote: Raffi, We obviously feel that users want the most relevant tweets first. Has this been determined and confirmed with user focus groups, or is this just an opinion that originated somewhere in a Twitter office or meeting room? I am one of those users, and I have just told you that I have no interest in seeing old tweets, regardless of how popular or relevant they deem to be by your algorithms. When I search Twitter (and I'm making this statement as a user of search.twitter.com, not as an API consumer) I want to see in real-time what is happening right now. That is why I am using search.twitter.com and not google.com for that purpose. If you're going to rather show relevant tweets, then I will instead use Google because their matching algorithms are far more advanced and mature. On Apr 6, 9:47 am, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: hi dewald. we obviously feel that users want the most relevant tweets first (the use of popular is unfortunate here). and the web interface of search.twitter.com has begun an evolution in that direction. it's still unclear what Twitter is going to do with the API (hence the silence), however, to go with your argument: time indexed search is, potentially, something a third party service could do. we do provide the streaming API to get much-better-than-search-real-time results. On Apr 6, 2010, at 4:28 AM, Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com wrote: Raffi, Tweet id is a no-brainer. We understand that an linear incrementing number does not scale because at some point it must cycle back to 1. Search is a different animal. When I do a Twitter search, I expect your system to tell me what is *happening* right now. I am NOT expecting your system to tell me what is *popular* right now. This popular tweet thing is diluting and violating your entire mission of real-time. If I search for earthquake I want to see what is *happening* in real- time. I have no interest in seeing a 30-minute old tweet from @aplusk or @ev just because they are trusted accounts and the tweet is being retweeted a lot (to simplify the popularity algorithm). If people have a need to see popular tweets, you know what? That is an ideal service to be provided by a third-party developer/service. Twitter is real-time, and has defined real-time information. Stick to it. Don't dilute your mission. On Apr 6, 1:03 am, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: we have the developer advocate we want, but, of course, please feel free to reach out to taylor with your concerns and what you would like him to do to help you all out. i'm sure he would welcome the help. as for what's going on behind the scenes, i'll describe it out as so: - tweet ID generation - this is a pure scalability problem that lays at the heart of twitter being able to grow. unless i'm mistaken, in the end, a centralized way of generating tweet IDs that are strictly increasing by one does not scale. the method that we generate tweet IDs, and therefore the IDs themselves, will, almost probably, have to change. - popular tweets in search - twitter is increasingly being relied upon to be the place for relevant real-time information. most end-users would say that a time indexed search stream is not as valuable. as you all can probably tell, keeping a real time search index operational is hard enough, but imagine keeping a service running that is simultaneously delivering relevant results along with time indexed results. that's significantly harder. those are the issues facing us. as i said, please bear with us -- once we have weighed all these issues internally, we will of course, let everybody know. we've heard the concerns, but, if there are new ones, please let us know! On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 8:28 PM, Orian Marx (@orian) or...@orianmarx.comwrote: Raffi, one of the things that really stands out for me in what you are saying here is that there are lots of moving pieces that the team is trying to align quickly. The question is, who and what is dictating the schedule? I get the sense that all the recent changes are parts of a bigger picture plan for Twitter, but the reality is that
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
But raffi why do you have to break the old to offer the new? we do our absolute best not to do so. as i mentioned in some previous thread - we do reserve the right to add things to the XML / JSON / etc. outputs -- so, please make sure to have parsers that can handle that. for me, that doesn't break our definition of backwards compatibility. Basically I've just updated MyPostButler to work again after your last unannounced changed the Thursday evening before a holiday break only to open my email this morning and see you are going to modify search api yet again in some undetermined period of time. as a FYI, we now have a policy here on the engineering team at twitter to not deploy any code on fridays (and long weekends and the like) - hopefully this won't happen to you again. but, of course, as with any change, there is a chance for a regression. we do our best to try to make sure that things don't break, and we try to react quickly when they do. please remember that twitter is a constantly evolving platform. I understand things need to change from time to time BUT why so often? Why cant you make the new changes opt-in rather than breaking all the previous applications already deployed out there. again - its an evolving platform. we do our best to make things backwards compatible. i'm happy to provide hints on how to make sure your code can be resilient to forward changes if you want me to. -- Raffi Krikorian Twitter Platform Team http://twitter.com/raffi -- To unsubscribe, reply using remove me as the subject.
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
We obviously feel that users want the most relevant tweets first. Has this been determined and confirmed with user focus groups, or is this just an opinion that originated somewhere in a Twitter office or meeting room? twitter does run user studies. yes. I am one of those users, and I have just told you that I have no interest in seeing old tweets, regardless of how popular or relevant they deem to be by your algorithms. When I search Twitter (and I'm making this statement as a user of search.twitter.com, not as an API consumer) I want to see in real-time what is happening right now. That is why I am using search.twitter.com and not google.com for that purpose. If you're going to rather show relevant tweets, then I will instead use Google because their matching algorithms are far more advanced and mature. as i'm sure you can appreciate, twitter has a lot of users / customers you are of course, more than welcome to use google as a search engine for tweets ... :P all in all - i hope a lot of you are coming to chirp, as i would absolutely happy to have this conversation in person over some beers :P -- Raffi Krikorian Twitter Platform Team http://twitter.com/raffi -- To unsubscribe, reply using remove me as the subject.
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
On 6 April 2010 17:27, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: our search and relevancy algorithms are constantly changing. we take in a slew of signals like engagement or conversation around tweets, and use that to pull it higher in search results. whether we will provide the exact details of how that algorithm works, i'm not sure. its analogous to google page rankings -- the general notion is well known, but the exact details are constantly changing behind the scenes. we're still trying to figure out things internally regarding these top tweets / popular tweets / relevant tweets, but, as always, one could just connect to the streaming API and get true real time tweets for earthquake. Maybe I could, but my 70 year old other couldn't. I also was talking from a users point of view, not a developers, and even for a develper, you might just want the data a little faster than you could knock up the working code to check the streaming API. At the moment, with 3-4 tweets from popular at the top, it's not too much of a problem, but my worry is that twitter intend to roll out the popularity algorithm to larger and larger chunks of search, thus losing the real time search aspect of which it should be proud. -- To unsubscribe, reply using remove me as the subject.
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 09:31, Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: all in all - i hope a lot of you are coming to chirp, as i would absolutely happy to have this conversation in person over some beers :P How about orange juice for those of us who don't drink? :-P Abraham -- Abraham Williams | Community Advocate | http://abrah.am PoseurTech Labs | Projects | http://labs.poseurtech.com This email is: [ ] shareable [x] ask first [ ] private. -- To unsubscribe, reply using remove me as the subject.
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
On 04/06/2010 09:31 AM, Raffi Krikorian wrote: all in all - i hope a lot of you are coming to chirp, as i would absolutely happy to have this conversation in person over some beers :P Black coffee for me, decaf if we're doing this at the hack session / unconference ;-) -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky borasky-research.net/m-edward-ed-borasky A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. ~ Paul Erdős
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
Hey everyone, My job title doesn't matter much. I do what I can and what needs to be done, whether that's being a contributing programmer on upcoming platform features, thoroughly testing an API before launch, analyzing implementations for spec compliance, communicating to and with the developer community, working closely with partners, writing documentation, or otherwise. My focus is on making the developer experience a positive one regardless of what bucket you fit into (hobbyist, corporate contributor, research scientist, or entrepreneur, or another lovely bucket). I might do that through building internal tools that make it more efficient and scalable for us to support you, I might do that by helping people out here who have questions, and I certainly might do that by channeling feedback generated in this particular segment of the developer community back to internal teams. When answering questions or engaging in discussions on this forum, I try to answer specific questions that are representative of the whole. I might not answer your specific question, but it's likely I'll answer a similar question with a response that would also apply to your own. Sometimes I will be intentionally obtuse. Often I will be overly verbose. If I don't perceive that I have something meaningful or valuable to add to a conversation or argument, I won't likely respond. We're listening. You're always a factor in the decision making process. Sometimes the community can help change a decision mid-flight (like us deciding to find another way to keep public_timeline alive, despite our desire to deprecate). There will be other times that we'll make a decision that's not in alignment with the perceived popular opinion. All of these things are true. I'll do my best to be transparent on our thought process when it's appropriate to do so; there are times when we won't make our intentions perfectly clear. The Twitter API will change. You I will change with it. This is abstract. This is concrete. This is not a surprise. This is not a pipe. I'm still learning. Taylor Singletary Developer Advocate, Twitter http://twitter.com/episod On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 12:40 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky zn...@comcast.netwrote: On 04/06/2010 09:31 AM, Raffi Krikorian wrote: all in all - i hope a lot of you are coming to chirp, as i would absolutely happy to have this conversation in person over some beers :P Black coffee for me, decaf if we're doing this at the hack session / unconference ;-) -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky borasky-research.net/m-edward-ed-borasky A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. ~ Paul Erdős
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
Taylor, Your job title very much does matter. Any respectable public/open API publisher needs to be concerned with the needs, wants and feelings of their developer community. If you are part of Twitter's effort to address this concern, then you need to be doing certain things. If you are not, then you probably should not be labelled as doing these things in order not to produce misleading expectations among aforementioned developer community. From the sounds of things, you're somewhere between evangelist and client services, but nowhere close to being in the ballpark of developer advocate. I'm not saying you're not doing a good job, I'm just saying you're not doing THAT job. Unfortunately this just contributes to the idea that Twitter doesn't care about the people who enabled its success, that it's grown too big, too fast, to remember the little people, that it's all about the big money and not at all about the community. I'm sure that's driven in large part by Evil Investors, but somewhere at Twitter, someone needs to take a stand and strike a balance. Apparently that's not you. ∞ Andy Badera ∞ +1 518-641-1280 Google Voice ∞ This email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private ∞ Google me: http://www.google.com/search?q=andrew%20badera On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 7:07 PM, Taylor Singletary taylorsinglet...@twitter.com wrote: Hey everyone, My job title doesn't matter much. I do what I can and what needs to be done, whether that's being a contributing programmer on upcoming platform features, thoroughly testing an API before launch, analyzing implementations for spec compliance, communicating to and with the developer community, working closely with partners, writing documentation, or otherwise. My focus is on making the developer experience a positive one regardless of what bucket you fit into (hobbyist, corporate contributor, research scientist, or entrepreneur, or another lovely bucket). I might do that through building internal tools that make it more efficient and scalable for us to support you, I might do that by helping people out here who have questions, and I certainly might do that by channeling feedback generated in this particular segment of the developer community back to internal teams. When answering questions or engaging in discussions on this forum, I try to answer specific questions that are representative of the whole. I might not answer your specific question, but it's likely I'll answer a similar question with a response that would also apply to your own. Sometimes I will be intentionally obtuse. Often I will be overly verbose. If I don't perceive that I have something meaningful or valuable to add to a conversation or argument, I won't likely respond. We're listening. You're always a factor in the decision making process. Sometimes the community can help change a decision mid-flight (like us deciding to find another way to keep public_timeline alive, despite our desire to deprecate). There will be other times that we'll make a decision that's not in alignment with the perceived popular opinion. All of these things are true. I'll do my best to be transparent on our thought process when it's appropriate to do so; there are times when we won't make our intentions perfectly clear. The Twitter API will change. You I will change with it. This is abstract. This is concrete. This is not a surprise. This is not a pipe. I'm still learning. Taylor Singletary Developer Advocate, Twitter http://twitter.com/episod On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 12:40 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky zn...@comcast.net wrote: On 04/06/2010 09:31 AM, Raffi Krikorian wrote: all in all - i hope a lot of you are coming to chirp, as i would absolutely happy to have this conversation in person over some beers :P Black coffee for me, decaf if we're doing this at the hack session / unconference ;-) -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky borasky-research.net/m-edward-ed-borasky A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. ~ Paul Erdős -- To unsubscribe, reply using remove me as the subject.
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
to clarify (from my personal view), what taylor has provided to the team is a clear view into what developers want / think / feel -- basically, a pulse on the developer community. he's doing a fine job. and for these particular issues, not only has he conveyed the feelings of our community, but everybody on the team has also heard it personally. i hope we have more to say about both these topics soon. as you can all imagine, there is a myriad of moving pieces that we are all trying to get to align quickly -- there are technical issues, there are the concerns of our developer and user community, and then, of course, there are the overall objectives of Twitter, Inc. getting them all to align is, at times, ridiculously difficult. On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Dewald Pretorius dpr...@gmail.com wrote: To be fair to Taylor, we may be expecting too much from his role. When reading the job description of a Twitter Developer Advocate [1], the only traditional advocate responsibility listed there is Represent developer needs when planning new API features and changes. Now, if Taylor conveyed our objections to the Platform team, then he adequately executed that responsibility. I'm sure he did. The rest of the responsibilities all speak in a Twitter to Developer direction, i.e., more a Communicator than an Advocate. In particular, in the About This Job section, it says, it is necessary to have an official voice regularly communicating with the community, which underlines Communicator instead of Advocate. [1] http://dld.bz/7Z On Apr 4, 9:39 pm, funkatron funkat...@gmail.com wrote: Taylor, I'm about to vent. Sorry about this. At some point did you plan on addressing any of the numerous complaints raised against making this anything other than opt-in? Several of us raised this, and you offered no response for 10 days. See http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/ browse_thread/thread/983086ae9935d50c/d4a8e0fbc0fee5c0? lnk=gstq=popular+search#d4a8e0fbc0fee5c0 When you *did* post, you didn't actually address any concerns, or say hey, I spoke with the API team. This is why it's going like this. Like, say, an advocate of 3rd party developers would do. I'm not doing Twitter any favors; I realize that. I'm just the developer of a tiny, old open source client whose been hacking away on the API since spring of 2007. I'm not a strategic partner, and I don't bring Twitter any value. No VC funding will be coming my way, I'm afraid, and it doesn't make headlines on TechCrunch when I add a new feature (ping.fm? I supported that in 2007). But what I would like is to be treated with some respect. If you post something, and get significant pushback, I'd expect at *very* least some explanation about why doing it the way you guys want to do it is a great idea. If you are an advocate for 3rd party developers, as I interpreted your title, then doing us the courtesy of not simply ignoring/avoiding the concerns we voice seems like part of your job. It seems like you're doing a lot of selling of changes to *us*. That's not an advocate -- that's an evangelist. If your role there is an evangelist, then fine. You're doing a good job of ignoring the tougher questions and sticking to company lines. The point here is that I used to cut the API crew a lot of slack because I thought they at least weren't feeding us a line. I felt they actually were aiming for transparency, but were just overworked. If this is the way things are gonna go with someone who is, presumably, tasked with being *our* advocate, I think Twitter is losing the thread. Maybe it doesn't matter for you guys financially, and you'll go on and do Very Important Things and lots of people will continue to view Twitter as Game-Changing Technology, but it sure is a bummer for me. -- Ed Finklerhttp://funkatron.com @funkatron AIM: funka7ron / ICQ: 3922133 / XMPP:funkat...@gmail.comxmpp%3afunkat...@gmail.com On Apr 1, 8:53 pm, Taylor Singletary taylorsinglet...@twitter.com wrote: Hi Folks, As indicated a few weeks ago, we're launching our new *beta* enhancements to search.twitter.com and the Search API today -- it's currently rolling out to our servers. Thank you all for your feedback. *Key API Takeaways*: - During the current phase, receiving popular tweets in your API search results is *OPT-IN*. You will not see the new top results in search unless you specify the *result_typ**e* parameter on your search query string. - The result_type parameter takes one of three values: * *mixed* - receive both popular tweets and most recent tweets for the query. This is the equivalent of the future default behavior. * *popular* - receive only popular tweets for the query. * *recent* - receive only recent results for the query. This is the equivalent of the behavior you've come
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now a
to clarify (from my personal view), what taylor has provided to the team is a clear view into what developers want / think / feel -- basically, a pulse on the developer community. he's doing a fine job. and for these particular issues, not only has he conveyed the feelings of our community, but everybody on the team has also heard it personally. i hope we have more to say about both these topics soon. as you can all imagine, there is a myriad of moving pieces that we are all trying to get to align quickly -- there are technical issues, there are the concerns of our developer and user community, and then, of course, there are the overall objectives of Twitter, Inc. getting them all to align is, at times, ridiculously difficult. I appreciate all of that, but the particular issue at hand is only emblematic of what I worry is a greater problem. If nothing else, a message to the list simply saying we're aware you guys don't like it, but we're doing it anyway and here is why would have at least won style points and would have reinforced that you're listening. It's your basketball court, so of course you get to decide how the game is played, but it would be nice to tell the players. (Well, okay, that metaphor gets overused during March Madness.) Seriously, there wasn't a single response back about that from anyone on the API team, and it wasn't for lack of asking. No one would have liked it, but acknowledgment of concerns even without being able to act on them goes a long way. -- personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- It's lonely at the top, but the food is better. -- To unsubscribe, reply using remove me as the subject.
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now a
consider this an acknowledgement and a response, then :P these are two pretty big issues (tweet IDs and popular tweets in search). and the silence has been because we're working really hard behind the scenes to make sure we, ourselves, have weighed all the options on the axes i laid out, and we feel, given that, that we got it right. we heard all the concerns and we know that change, especially sizable change, can be painful for all. once we have things finalized, we will definitely be messaging it to the list. On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Cameron Kaiser spec...@floodgap.com wrote: to clarify (from my personal view), what taylor has provided to the team is a clear view into what developers want / think / feel -- basically, a pulse on the developer community. he's doing a fine job. and for these particular issues, not only has he conveyed the feelings of our community, but everybody on the team has also heard it personally. i hope we have more to say about both these topics soon. as you can all imagine, there is a myriad of moving pieces that we are all trying to get to align quickly -- there are technical issues, there are the concerns of our developer and user community, and then, of course, there are the overall objectives of Twitter, Inc. getting them all to align is, at times, ridiculously difficult. I appreciate all of that, but the particular issue at hand is only emblematic of what I worry is a greater problem. If nothing else, a message to the list simply saying we're aware you guys don't like it, but we're doing it anyway and here is why would have at least won style points and would have reinforced that you're listening. It's your basketball court, so of course you get to decide how the game is played, but it would be nice to tell the players. (Well, okay, that metaphor gets overused during March Madness.) Seriously, there wasn't a single response back about that from anyone on the API team, and it wasn't for lack of asking. No one would have liked it, but acknowledgment of concerns even without being able to act on them goes a long way. -- personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- It's lonely at the top, but the food is better. -- To unsubscribe, reply using remove me as the subject. -- Raffi Krikorian Twitter Platform Team http://twitter.com/raffi
Re: [twitter-dev] Re: What Exactly is a Developer Advocate? (was Re: Opt-in beta of Popular Tweets for the Search API now available)
- Raffi Krikorian ra...@twitter.com wrote: • popular tweets in search - twitter is increasingly being relied upon to be the place for relevant real-time information. most end-users would say that a time indexed search stream is not as valuable. as you all can probably tell, keeping a real time search index operational is hard enough, but imagine keeping a service running that is simultaneously delivering relevant results along with time indexed results. that's significantly harder. Ah, see, *this* is the conversation *I* want! ;-) For example, search marketing is a well-established branch of online marketing, and both Google and Microsoft provide tools for marketers that tell them what people search for. Microsoft even provides tools that do a half-way decent job of distinguishing between people who are just looking and people who are searching with commercial intention. They also measure this internally and use it to tweak their indexing algorithms so they balance the needs of the seekers and the sellers. Maybe it's on Twitter's road map to provide Twitter Search Keyword Tools, and then again, maybe it isn't. Maybe Twitter doesn't want to be a search marketing platform. ;-) All I'm saying is that it isn't just a technical problem - if your data say that Twitter Search users - seekers, since there don't appear to be provisions for sellers yet - that popularity is how they want to rank tweets, and by extension, tweeters, for relevance, then that's what you should go with. Because the third-party monitoring outfits have migrated or will migrate to Streaming and will do the indexing their clients require. And they'll pay Twitter for the access levels they need to meet their clients' requirements. And if you don't *have* data, well ... ;-) -- To unsubscribe, reply using remove me as the subject.
