Jumat, 17 Agustus 2012

Twitter's Draconian API Rules Alienate Developers and Soon Users


Twitter is continuing to push away developers that were once the core of the Twitter experience. The site has been very aggressive in taking control over more parts of its ecosystem to the detriment of developers that built stuff on top of the Twitter API.

Granted, Twitter has every right to police its API in any way it wants. The many changes Twitter has revealed in a recent blog post are obviously geared towards making sure people spend more time with the site and official apps and don't skip out on any of the ads.

This is obviously a good idea for Twitter's ad business. But just as Twitter is free to do what it wants with its assets, developers and users alike are free to go elsewhere if they feel too pushed around.

At this point, Twitter doesn't seem to care that much if developers leave the platform, it would actually prefer it if most of them would. It wants developers to add value to the Twitter platform, but not alter the experience or take users away from the official avenues.

If given the option of keeping the status quo or having no platform at all, Twitter would choose the latter in a heartbeat. The company pays quite a lot to maintain the platform and it doesn't get much out of it, financially.

But it's the developers and the community that have built Twitter into what it is. For many years, the site was rubbish and it still is lacking in many respects. Third-party apps made up for it and filled in the gaps.

At the same time, users came up with new ways of using the site and what it offered. They invented the @reply the hashtag, retweets and many of the core Twitter features of today. They did it because they liked Twitter. But the good faith will run out sooner than Twitter expects it.

Already, developers are quite upset and users are noticing. App.net has been the talk of the town, not so much because of its core qualities, but because it came about as an alternative to Twitter's increasingly draconian rules. This sentiment will grow and Twitter will regret it.

Via: Twitter's Draconian API Rules Alienate Developers and Soon Users

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