On Sun, 13 Feb 2011 12:18:11 -0600, "Andrew W. Donoho"
<[email protected]> wrote:
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.)
User Streams is in fact in production and has been for months. The only
restrictions on User Streams, other than what's documented in the
technical documentation, is that it is *only* for desktop *clients*, not
servers or mobile. I'm not sure where iPad fits in this spectrum, but
for sure an iPhone is mobile.
*Site* Streams is designed for servers and it is still in beta. Perhaps
you need to be pitching your idea to Twitter and adapting your service
to Site Streams if it's a server-backed app, which I'm guessing an
iPhone/iPad app would be.
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.
[snip]
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.
The key word in this rant is "partner". A *partner* is, IMHO, someone
who has a *formal* partnership arrangement. Sure, there's a certain
formality when you accept Twitter's TOS, but I think if you want to use
Site Streams or Promoted content, you should be negotiating as a
business with Twitter as a business. What's in it for Twitter?
Twitter has built a powerful brand. I was there in early 2007 when the
vast majority of pundits predicted that it would go nowhere - that it
was just a bunch of Ruby hackers with too much time on their hands, that
it would destroy flow, etc. It's now one of the top ten sites world wide
according to Alexa. If you want to be a "partner" with Twitter, *you*
are the one who needs to have something to offer *them* IMHO.
[snip]
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.
I seem to have missed that claim. As far as I know, they *are* trying
to capture revenue through a combination of Promoted Accounts, Tweets
and Trends with bundled analytics and data licensing.
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.
I think you have User Streams, though it may not be suitable for your
specific application. You may be eligible to get in the Site Streams
beta, although I'm guessing that was invite-only. You can always ask -
as a business negotiating a partnership with another business.
We'll have to wait and see about the Promoted products. Advertising
sales is a fiercely competitive business and it's not something I
personally want to deal with at the moment.
Annotations? That was definitely a case where Twitter's reach seems to
have exceeded its grasp. The story I've heard is that there are people
in Twitter hacking away on it but the priorities do get adjusted
according to the demands of the marketplace. If it could be a
breakthrough spam killer, I think they'd push it front and center in a
big hurry. ;-)
--
http://twitter.com/znmeb http://borasky-research.net
"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." -- Paul
Erdős
--
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