On Feb 13, 2011, at 08:53 , Umashankar Das wrote:
> Now, Twitter and it's API groups claim that, they, are putting artificial
> limits of rates to ensure proper delivery for regular service.
Mr. Das,
While you make many interesting points in your "rant", I think many of
them are conjecture and opinion. As reasonable people can disagree about
opinions, I've edited them out of my reply. I wish to focus on some unambiguous
issues. We each have to make our business bets with respect to the Twitter
platform. (I speak as the developer of ch@tter™, an iPad Twitter client. In
many ways, Twitter destroyed my business opportunity when they purchased
Tweetie and made it free. I mention this for context and not as a cause to rant
at Twitter. I'm making plenty of money as a result of building ch@tter™. The
iOS consulting business is very healthy.)
It is clear from this thread that many developers made, perhaps
unwisely, product plans based on Twitter's continued support for white listing.
In my case as a client developer, the increase of my API count from 150/hour to
350/hour due to moving to OAuth totally removed my need for white listing. If
user streams was supported, I could easily live with 150/hour limit. If they
would stand behind their user streams API, I would switch to it immediately.
(Beta status is not, frankly, good enough. If they cannot make a commitment to
their new API, why should I? By my count, user streams has been in beta for
almost 6 months.)
Changing a platform's API is hard. Twitter is discovering this the hard
way. Every developer has an investment they would like to preserve in the
status quo. That said, Twitter's API evolution practices, presumably approved
by their CTO, Mr. Sarver, are not, in my opinion, helping their partners grow
with Twitter. That they are turning off white listing while not having yet made
a production commitment to user streams, is a great example of an evolutionary
stumble. That they haven't announced any other methods of enhancing Twitter's
ability to scale while supporting functionality enabled by the large white
lists is an oversight. The outrage expressed in this thread is good,
unambiguous evidence of the stumble.
Another example is the closed roll-out of promoted tweets. I think
every third party app developer would love to find a way to further monetize
their Twitter application. Twitter did announce that they would find a way to
allow their developer partners to participate with the promoted tweets program.
That has not yet happened. Currently, as Twitter has made a floor price of
$0.00 for iOS apps, I have to resort to Apple's iAds to capture revenue from my
labors. I don't mind but it does cut my other market-making partner, Twitter,
out of the revenue stream. As it reduces my revenue opportunities, I think this
is sub-optimal. I win when my partner wins.
A third example is the annotation feature. I am sure all of us could
find an excellent use for annotations. I have many ideas on how to use them.
But I cannot.
A fourth example is Chirp? When is it? Will they hold it in a large
enough venue? Or is it going to be like their announcement of #NewTwitter. A
major announcement whose video was streamed by Robert Scoble? The sound was
poor. The image sucked. And, BTW, thank you Robert Scoble. Without him Twitter
could not have gotten their message quickly out.
In contrast to these missteps, I have to publicly thank Mr. Singletary,
Mr. Kalucki and Mr. Harris. Without their constant engagement on this list, the
Twitter ecosystem would not be what it is.
Overall, everyone needs to remember that we are dealing with a company
that publicly claims to not yet be trying to capture revenue from their
platform. We are seeing from their experiments the collateral damage. Rolling
with the punches is painful. That is the cost of trying to access the almost
200 million Twitter users.
What do I want? I want a better developer experience. Both Apple and
Microsoft show what a good experience can be. I want user streams, a promoted
tweet API and annotations. I hope Twitter can deliver these technical features
to enable new business opportunities for themselves and the Twitter app
ecosystem. Myself included.
Anon,
Andrew
____________________________________
Andrew W. Donoho
Donoho Design Group, L.L.C.
[email protected], +1 (512) 750-7596
Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Willing is not enough; we must do.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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