Twitter shut down Emojitracker's access

https://medium.com/@mroth/u-1f647-person-bowing-deeply-5402c3ee5676#.z3df4bj6h

by exolymph • 10 years ago

293 182 10 years ago

Aw that's too bad, I just discovered Emojitracker yesterday and thought it was really cool.

Also: is the service being removed colloquially known as the "Twitter Firehose", or something else? I recently implemented a feature that uses the standard rate-limited API. I went through a lot of pain to get the most out of the rate limits. And people would always ask me "why don't you just get all the tweets through the Streaming API?". I wonder if I had done that, how screwed I would be now.

exolymph2• 10 years ago

It's hard to sort out the colloquial terms for Twitter features from what the company calls them =/

mattzito6• 10 years ago

Okay, here we go:

- Twitter Firehose - full stream of all Tweets, commercial

- Twitter Decahose - 10% sample of Tweets for analysis, commercial

- Twitter Powertrack - real-time streaming of posts based on query (country, language, keyword, etc.), commercial

- Twitter Full-archive API - search interface for entire corpus of Tweets, commercial

- Twitter Streaming API - a mini-powertrack of posts based on basic keyword searches (up to 400 keywords), free

- Twitter Streaming Sample - a small sampling of Tweets for statistical analysis, free

There's a couple more esoteric product offerings from a data perspective, but these are the relevant ones. I think it's a pretty broad breadth of different options, with different functionality at the free and commercial options.

xutopia• 10 years ago

What did emojitracker do?

wpietri• 10 years ago

http://www.emojitracker.com/

spiznnx• 10 years ago

It still does, for a few more weeks.

http://emojitracker.com/

Basically live tracks tweets that use emoji, so emoji are ranked by frequency.

NSAID• 10 years ago

Emojitracker gives live, realtime usage numbers for all emoji used on twitter.

http://emojitracker.com/

mattzito6• 10 years ago

So, Twitter has long had two different classes of access:

- "Twitter Developer" access - which is what you find here: https://dev.twitter.com/ - that includes a streaming API that is relatively limited in terms of volume of data and operators that are allowed, but is free and open

- Gnip Twitter access - this is commercial access that would include the Firehose option (though that's not very common). But basically this is a paid offering that offers much more functionality than the developer platform.

In this specific case, the author is just losing elevated access to the streaming API:

https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/reference/post/statuses/fi...

I'm guessing they had extra keywords or multiple connections available so they could track those keywords. Nothing to do with the firehose or anything else. Just a user who had an exception to the official policy that's being taken away.

cmyr• 10 years ago

For a long time twitter has offered specific developers who were doing projects they thought were interesting the ability to consumer a higher volume of traffic using the standard streaming endpoints.

aioprisan6• 10 years ago

Another example of Twitter taking steps to kill their platform dreams and push developers away. So much for Jack's renewed push for improved developer relations.

yeukhon2• 10 years ago

Well this is on the front-page now. maybe he will scream at the team and say "don't shut it down."

pc86• 10 years ago

I don't think Jack gets his news from HN.

aioprisan6• 10 years ago

You mean like they shut down the Twitter share counter data right after Jack had a big conference once he came back as CEO promising better developer relations? So, I doubt they care about the state of developer relations, as a platform.

mattzito6• 10 years ago

This is a situation where one developer had a special exception carved out for them for a non-commercial project that everyone thought was cool. That access persisted for three years until someone made a decision that giving free access to something that normally they charge quite a lot of money for is not worth it.

Twitter offers several free endpoints for developers, including search, streaming, a raw sample of tweets, and the like. They all have rate limits and the like attached, but they're real, free, access to their data.

For people who want bigger, broader, deeper access, they sell access to that data. That's been the case for the last few years.

In this case, Emojitracker unfortunately falls into the cracks in between, where they need deeper access to do what they want, but it's not a commercial enterprise.

I agree, it would be nice of Twitter to continue giving Emojitracker free access, but are they obligated to do that? They are a business, and providing access to millions of Tweets for free seems like an unfair obligation to ask them to continue indefinitely.

pyre3• 10 years ago

They are a business, and providing access to millions of Tweets for free seems like an unfair obligation to ask them to continue indefinitely.

While not indefinitely, it would certainly help the case to just public a cost-benefit analysis of how much Emojitracker's access was costing Twitter (though not in terms of "lost revenue" based on what Emojitracker would have been paying for that access).

eli2• 10 years ago

The comment you are replying did not say or imply Twitter was obligated to do anything.

But continuing to provide this noncommercial API access for free indefinitely is exactly what I think they should do and I'm a little disappointed that they don't agree. Twitter isn't wrong here, they're just assholes.

wslh5• 10 years ago

For people who want bigger, broader, deeper access, they sell access to that data. That's been the case for the last few years.

Can I pay $ 100 extra per month for more access?

forgetsusername• 10 years ago

That access persisted for three years until someone made a decision that giving free access to something that normally they charge quite a lot of money for is not worth it.

Right. The point here is that the decision might be stupid. It's fodder for exactly this type of a story, while Twitter is pushing for improved relations with developers and trying determine its future as a going concern.

Of course they aren't obligated to do continue to provide free access, in the same sense that I'm not obligated to use their platform. But it might be in their best interest (in both cases).

For all the acclaim that Mr. Dorsey gets as a CEO, Twitter is a great idea but a basket case of a public company.

pfooti• 10 years ago

If it was the case that emojitracker was reselling that api access, I could see cutting it off.

But I think that a rich, robust ecosystem would flourish more around a platform that provided free API access to noncommercial projects.

Of course, it's conceivable that this API access costs twitter a significant amount of money - it is a lot of data, after all. Even a low cost could be written off as advertising within the platform. "Look at the cool stuff we could build on this API, let's make a commercial product and pay twitter for access!"

ChuckMcM2• 10 years ago

It feels to me like "kill platform dreams" is written on the other side of the coin that says "sustainable business model".

It is a serious challenge that the data has some value, but that value is hard to extract usefully as a revenue stream. The emojitracker folks won't pay much, but offering it to them at a small rate vs a high rate to some other service has its own issues.

But since emojii tracker isn't real time, could they use a month old firehose? 6 months old? At some point the value of the firehose access falls off for "mainstream" users of that data, does it fall to a point where there is marginal value in giving free access to others on it? Even for small dollars?

Clearly as a public company Twitter has to do what it can to get good value for the assets it has created. That is a hard thing to do.

Karunamon• 10 years ago

At the risk of sounding pedantic: Twitter's assets were created by its users, not the company. They alienate the users, there are no more assets and no more value to be had.

Sarkie• 10 years ago

The problem I see with Twitter and the reason it stagnated and isn't making money, is they don't really understand their platform and users.

Flip that with Snapchat who 100% do know their users and converting them into customers.

c0nducktr• 10 years ago

What does converting users into customers mean for snapchat? What are they selling?

tangled_zans7• 10 years ago

Hmm, do YOU understand Twitter's platform and users? If you have some cool insights into those things then I'd love to hear them!

joeblau• 10 years ago

Based on http://www.emojitracker.com, there is a lot of Joy, and Love on Twitter.

TaylorGood• 10 years ago

With @jack having tweeted about this just months ago, talk about an internal disconnect..

duaneb• 10 years ago

So even if Twitter were to give me free access to the Gnip APIs, others then wouldn’t be able to take my code and build upon it

I mean, isn't this the case anyway? Few people have "elevated access to the Streaming API that Emojitracker depends on in order to operate at its high volume"

grandalf6• 10 years ago

I've often wondered why Twitter seems to do this again and again in spite of what appears to be common sense and good stewardship of its platform and ecosystem.

I think it's because Twitter is actually a successful, fairly open ecosystem that attracts all kinds of use.

What seems like ham-handed or draconian decision making is just Twitter misunderstanding its role as infrastructure provider.

What we all implicitly want from Twitter is for it to embody the values of net neutrality. If someone can build something cool on top of Twitter, why not let it happen?

Twitter's investors have pressured the company to monetize, and most of the bad platform decisions seem to be tied to those efforts.

Twitter's folly is assuming that usage patterns are "bad". It should view all usage in a content-neutral manner and provide and support APIs to let the ecosystem grow.

It is the hubris of caring too much about content and content engagement metrics that is driving this folly.

Twitter is a very simple broadcast graph. This is incredibly powerful, and while it's not quite as lucrative to own as Facebook (with users habituated to seeing the same boring stuff from the same boring people every day and clicking on sponsored content), it's far more powerful and is likely to change society more than other social media platforms.

All this is why Twitter should pivot and become a decentralized infrastructure... of course this will never happen. I'm predicting that Twitter will die a slow death as it tries to copy Facebook's revenue generation approach. It is also copying Facebook's real name initiative by caring too much about content attribution and verified accounts (which users don't care about).

Eventually we may see a decentralized broadcast graph, but until then it makes sense to expect Twitter to behave like a cognitively impaired dictator with respect to its ecosystem.

I think most of this is driven by intense cost-cutting measures and intensely misguided focus on revenue metrics in terms of content and engagement. Twitter is not a product, it's an infrastructure.

mschuster91• 10 years ago

It is also copying Facebook's real name initiative by caring too much about content attribution and verified accounts (which users don't care about).

I fully agree with you, except on this point. With all the shitstorming, the mis-attribution of quotes, massive and massive amounts of fake accounts etc. going on, the Verified by Twitter program is a very good thing especially as it does not force you to publically post your real name.

However, it could be expanded for greater reach.

grandalf6• 10 years ago

I totally see your point. My counter-argument would be:

If Twitter is a neutral platform, a fake account is not distinguishable from a real one and it doesn't matter. It takes an incredible amount of work to make a fake account seem like a real person.

By creating content leaderboards that do not remove fraudulent network effects, Twitter has created an incentive for fake account creation. Its own ad-sales model benefits from this too, since many of the platform's top line numbers include fraudulent engagement data.

Also, Twitter has not made data/tooling available for third party providers (like SimplyMeasured, Radian6, etc.) to do meaningful fraud analysis, so companies are paying for social media engagement numbers that include bots, sock puppets, etc.

But my larger point is that as a network Twitter should not care about spam and should instead let others determine what content is "good" vs "bad" for their particular use case.

dublinben• 10 years ago

the Verified by Twitter program is a very good thing

When the program is used to delegitimize public figures who dissent from the left wing hegemony on the site[0], then it has lost all legitimacy. Verifying accounts now implies tacit approval of their message, which is not something Twitter should enter into lightly.

[0]http://www.businessinsider.com/milo-yiannopoulos-nero-unveri...

dave20002• 10 years ago

It's possible to over think things. Twitter exists to make money. They clearly thought this change would cost them nothing, and would perhaps save them money and effort. I don't think the "Twitter is a ..." thing has any relevance to the decision making process. I can think of very few things, related to the Internet, that haven't turned - or are not on the process of turning to - shit. No matter how cool anything starts out being, eventually the original developers sell it on or come up with stupid ideas and it gets ruined. It's like some inescapable physical property.

grandalf6• 10 years ago

Twitter exists to make money.

True, but for a platform business there has to be a correct recognition of the relevant time horizon. Amazon's profitability numbers in its first decade illustrate this.

tlogan2• 10 years ago

Yes - Twitter exists to make money.

But they need to decide how they want to make their money and grow in parallel. Is it ads? Celebrities accounts? Is it selling API access?

If I'm Twitter CEO I would stick with "developer friendly" approach in order to re-start Twitter growth.

In short, my opinion is that companies needs to be nice with developers and cherish them all the way until the company is very very successful. I guess Twitter executives think that they made it and "developer friendly" stage is behind them.

logicallee2• 10 years ago

If twitter exists to make money, then why aren't they operating a franchise network of fast-food restaurants, since that more obviously makes money than an sms-length syndication service. Also, shouldn't they be selling music streaming? Why aren't they in most markets at all? Do most markets have a marginal revenue of zero or negative?

Because Twitter doesn't "exist to make money" it also "exists to be Twitter." I'd prefer to never again hear that something "exists to make money", which is quite facile.

EDIT: there's a bit of a war between downvoters and upvoters on this comment. Let me break it down for you. The only way to agree that "twitter exists to make money" is by agreeing that the mission statement of every company on Earth should be, "Make money." Not much of a mission statement is it?

tracker1• 10 years ago

Well, it's role as an infrastructure provider is to not go bankrupt and shut down... in order to do this, it needs to make money somehow... they've chosen a two pronged approach to this. Someone/somewhere has to pay for it, and the end users simply won't do it...

1. Promoted tweeks - frankly, I find this kind of annoying, but I do understand.

2. Limiting high bandwidth streams to paid/commercial accounts, I'm not sure what they offer for NPOs, but I'd be surprised if they weren't lenient in their pricing structure.

Frankly, I understand it... At this point they aren't even breaking even iirc, so they need to make cuts to some deep cost centers that aren't facing end users.

TBH, I think they should also put methods in place of detecting bot networks, and freezing out those accounts.

grandalf6• 10 years ago

Well, it's role as an infrastructure provider is to not go bankrupt and shut down

I realize that, I'm just not sure the investors have the right long-term view about the value Twitter offers.

obsurveyor• 10 years ago

Infrastructure is a bad word to Wall Street, it implies it's no longer a growth stock. Wall Street will burn TWTR to the ground if it doesn't keep growing because no one on Wall Street cares about value, they want consistent quarter-over-quarter growth. This makes public companies like Twitter flail about wildly trying to find anything to keep their stock price from sinking even if it's outside their wheelhouse and wildly distorts their services/products.

tangled_zans7• 10 years ago

That's a really good analysis of what I was hoping Twitter could have been, and what it has actually became.

I am quite curious to poke your brain a little on this. I agree that the concept of Twitter-as-an-infrastructure could be amazing. I also agree that what they're doing is definitely taking massive steps away from that ideal (Whatever Twitter's initial lofty goals were, I would classify its current niche to be some sort of celebrity-gossip/outrage machine).

I'm having trouble articulating exactly what the correct thing for them to do would be, though? What sort of API access would you envision that they can provide in order to help developers grow the infrastructure in the best way possible?

You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work?

btrask• 10 years ago

Twitter should be a dumb pipe.

Something like twtxt[1], except trivially easy to host, and searchable, and (the hard part) with all of Twitter's users.

[1] https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

Nadya• 10 years ago

You mention that Twitter could become a decentralized infrastructure. What exactly do you mean by that, and how would it work?

GNU Social [0] is a good stepping stone. Decentralized Twitter with different hosted instances joined together so everyone on the network can communicate. You're free to take your data and move it to any other instance you want or even host your own.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11062757

roosterjm2k2• 10 years ago

This is a very entitled piece... and a very entitled thought process...

When you are using someone else's platform, they still make the rules... this line in particular: "it wouldn’t help other developers who I believe deserve to get the same level of opportunity as me." ... nobody "deserves" access to any API... period.

I don't understand the entitlement in so many tech projects, who get upset when a 3rd party they are freely using changes their service... you were never entitled to it in the first place, you merely benefited from its existence and should be appreciative of what you were allowed to do instead of feel entitled to it.

nonanako• 10 years ago

I think it comes from many companies branding themselves as altruistic and developer-friendly. I don't think people would be surprised at this move had Twitter said: "Using our platform? We own you. We will pursue all potential profit deriving from our platform to the fullest extent of the law."

mroth• 10 years ago

Author here. To be clear, I don't believe I deserve free or special access to anything. The point I was trying to make was actually more in the opposite direction: I wouldn't want to receive free/special access as an exception now simply because the project has become "famous", if the same opportunity doesn't exist for other independent developers when their projects are starting out -- I just want to encourage a level playing field.

(When Emojitracker originally received elevated access 3 years ago, the project was not famous or well known at all, it was just a slightly more formal version of Me saying: "hey check this out, I think this might be a cool hack but I need access to 900 keywords instead of 400, that ok?" and Twitter: "yeah cool, no problem dude.")

Bedon2922• 10 years ago

So you are still accessing the streaming endpoint, but you have more keywords than they normally allow? So you are not accessing the entire Firehose and parsing from there, right? Do you regularly update it to include new emoji when they come out? I am thinking about ways to do it on the free stream still, just trying to see where you are already at.

williamcotton5• 10 years ago

You should only expect a level playing field from public infrastructure.

You should never expect a level playing field from private infrastructure.

If anything this is more proof for the need of a public access Twitter-like service using public key crypto for self-signed authentication.

hobs• 10 years ago

Then twitter should stop coming to the dev community and begging for us to like them again.

When twitter was just shutting things down and making it clear they were going to make money off the thing, I wasnt surprised nor was I happy, they had clearly decided to monetize what other people were doing themselves, but worse.

Since then twitter has not done anything that I would consider engaging or of note, and from the articles I read on HN, in a crunch on how the heck to monetize their platform and are coming back to the dev community trying to win mindshare.

You can't have it both ways.

shawn-butler• 10 years ago

You clearly were not part of the launch of twitter.

They sought out and begged for developers to use their platform. Then they started killing the apps one by one.

Your comment while "wise" in hindsight is thoughtless, arrogant and tone deaf to the work involved in creating an actual product that users use.

There is a large difference between entitlement and disappointment.

williamcotton5• 10 years ago

In the future you should invest your energies in building and supporting open and public platforms instead of hoping that some private company isn't going to part ways with your interests at some point.

The OP was not being thoughtless, arrogant or tone deaf, he was just being honest. If you feel disappointed it is because you made a poor decision. You should learn from your mistakes instead of shouting at the person who points out the tragic results of your actions.

There are plenty of open source and open platform projects out there. BitTorrent, Bitcoin, HTTP, OpenPGP... pick one and start building!

You should feel entitled to your individual rights in whatever republic you live in. You should not feel entitled to tell a private company how to run their business. Doing otherwise will always lead to disappointment.

AznHisoka• 10 years ago

Out of all the sentences in OP's post.. that was the one that showed the LEAST entitlement. He's basically saying "I don't want to be treated special since everyone else doesn't have elevated access". That's all.

drinchev• 10 years ago

Yeah. I was recently building a simple bot for Twitter ( a favor for a friend of mine ). Things worked out, but everywhere I go I read "API Rate limited to ... per ..."

I know ... It's tremendous amount of data going on there, so I just don't want to imagine how hard it is to scale it and offer that to everyone.

Nevertheless it's so sad that they break promises.

Twitter nowadays is a bot driven, marketing platform ( with some sort of journalism touch ). I still remember the days that I was excited when I got a new follower. Now I think it's just about "hashtags".

willu• 10 years ago

I have no love for Twitter, Gnip, or the way they've treated API devs over the years but this particular use case (ranking emojis by frequency of use) seems like it could be just as well served by the free sampled stream. I can't imagine anyone needing the exact usage counts vs. the relative popularity. Also, the author's stated goal of making it open and immediately usable by other developers would be better served by using the access level that is freely available to everyone.

TheHappyRock• 10 years ago

Agreed, I don't think the full stream is needed either. It think being built of the free stream will serve the needs of making it open and still provide interesting data. Relative(sampling) usage graphs even seem more digestable and interesting to me.

kmfrk• 10 years ago

I'm surprised there are still developers left for Twitter to piss off.

bobbyadamson• 10 years ago

I don't understand why people continue to build things for services that have a track record of shutting things down.

stevebmark• 10 years ago

This makes sense to me. Granting free firehose access to a small, fun project like this seems like unnecessary overhead for Twitter. I think their mistake was granting it in the first place.

Razengan2• 10 years ago

Exactly. Wasn't HN almost unanimously in support of GitHub throttling CocoaPods barely a week ago?

How is this any different? Honest question.

spriggan32• 10 years ago

CocoaPods was throttled not shut down. Twitter has an history of shutting down access to its API without notice or warning when a project becomes too popular.

jacquesm• 10 years ago

But then once you do grant it you should only revoke it for a really good reason (such as abuse or some other violation of the terms of service). Otherwise it should simply continue.

JamesMcMinn• 10 years ago

Everyone with elevated access is losing it in June as far as I'm aware - at least that's the case for academic uses. There will be academic pricing for Gnip, although we don't know how much it'll cost, I'm doubtful it'll be low enough for most academics to afford.

They've been telling us that they planned to shut down free elevated access down for well over a year now, so this doesn't come as a huge surprise. Twitter seems to do regular audits like this, and at least for our academic work, we've had to tell them what we're working on etc. every 6 months or so to keep elevated access.

Having said that, looking at the volume of data that Emojitracker is pulling down, it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to spread the tracking over 2 or 3 separate connections. The UserStream API, whilst not designed for server-to-server connections, would probably allow Emojitracker to spread the ~900 emoji they track over 3 streaming connections using only a single account.

CoolAssPuppy2• 10 years ago

Hi, I'm Prashant. I run Developer Relations at Twitter. I want to clarify a few things here.

In the past, Twitter had little formality associated with granting elevated access. It was very much, "Hey, I want to do this cool thing!" "Okay, sure, here you go." As Twitter's platform business has matured to include many businesses building billions of dollars worth of social media monitoring and other tools, we've formalized the process to becoming a Twitter Official Partner (partners.twitter.com). Over the last six months, we've started contacting all of those API key holders with elevated access and asked them to clarify what they're doing. In some cases, we know the business and business owner and reach out personally. In other cases, like this one, the business is listed in our systems as "N/A", so we send the template mail.

In the email, we encourage people who believe their app is within the bounds of acceptable use cases on Twitter to contact us directly, and provide a link to do so. The owner of this app elected to blog publicly about the situation before contacting us, which is unfortunate. We have contacted the owner of this app and hope to resolve this situation, as we do with hundreds of other developers on our platform. We do occasionally provide exceptions for apps that are non-commercial (not-for-profit, no ads, etc.)

Note also that in this instance, the notice is NOT about shutting down this app. It merely inquires about why the developer needs elevated access, something that is typically reserved for our business partners.

None of this is related to continuing to use the Twitter API or our commitment to enabling developers to build on our platform (Fabric, Gnip, our Ads platform, and the Twitter API).

abritinthebay• 10 years ago

Simply put - your "template mail" is terrible.

If what you just said is what it the email meant to communicate then it fails at every level. Please don't try to shift the blame for Twitters poor communication to the recipient because they "elected to blog publicly about the situation".

The "situation" is entirely created by Twitter.

Twitter has a (recent) history of terrible communication with developers and it would not surprise anyone if what seemed to be the case WAS the case. If it is NOT the case, as you say, then you really need to improve your company communication.

jetpks• 10 years ago

In the email, we encourage people who believe their app is within the bounds of acceptable use cases on Twitter to contact us directly, and provide a link to do so.

I don't see any encouragement or really any path to recourse in the email. It reads as though the decision is final. Email linked from blog post: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*MoLgPNLiQwQ8s-Y1D...

chc• 10 years ago

Over the last six months, we've started contacting all of those API key holders with elevated access and asked them to clarify what they're doing. In some cases, we know the business and business owner and reach out personally. In other cases, like this one, the business is listed in our systems as "N/A", so we send the template mail.
In the email, we encourage people who believe their app is within the bounds of acceptable use cases on Twitter to contact us directly, and provide a link to do so. The owner of this app elected to blog publicly about the situation before contacting us, which is unfortunate. We have contacted the owner of this app and hope to resolve this situation, as we do with hundreds of other developers on our platform. We do occasionally provide exceptions for apps that are non-commercial (not-for-profit, no ads, etc.)

If this was the intent, the template email was kind of poorly drafted, because that's not what it says at all.

It says multiple times, without qualification, that they're going to be cut off — "this type of elevation will no longer be available," "your current elevated rate limits will no longer be available," "we will remove this elevation from your account," and "we encourage you to evaluate alternative options." At no point does it say that keeping the elevated access is an option.

So I mean, can you really blame the owner of this app for reading these absolute statements as being absolute and believing their app was cut off, rather than seeing it as some kind of sideways inquiry as to whether they think their use is acceptable?

LoSboccacc• 10 years ago

The email is perfectly drafted: it discourage comebacks while remaining vague enough for 'developer relations' to engage in damage controls when it struck some noisy player with large visibility.

eknkc• 10 years ago

Is this a joke? That email clearly states that such an access will not be available. Not what you claim here. Am I missing something?

forgottenpass• 10 years ago

Am I missing something?

Not really. This follows the coloring book pretty well:

Step 1. Inflexable corporate rhetoric and/or positions expressed privately.

Step 2. Other party blogs about a scenario that puts egg on their face.

Step 3. "Nah man, we're flexable! Why didn't you just talk to us first?!"

jrochkind1• 10 years ago

So, the OP provided the email he recieved.

It did not ask him to clarify what he is doing, it did not say anything about bounds of acceptable use cases or what they might be, it did not encourage him to contact Twitter directly, or provide a link to do so. It did _not_ "inquire about why the developer needs elevated access", there is no such inquiry in the email. It _did_ say elevated access was going away.

It said he could use the free API with rate limits, or the commercial Gnip API.

It kind of half-heartedly suggested he could "reply to this email" if he had "questions". From the email, there was no reason to think elevated access might still be available, it pretty clearly said it would _not_ be, so I'm not surprised he didn't have any questions -- the email was quite clear (at saying something pretty different than you are saying).

So when you describe the email that goes out -- it does not seem to describe the one he received, according to him in the post. Are you talking about a different email? That he did not receive, or that you think he should have received in addition? Or do you actually think that email somehow communicates what you describe above? (It really really does not, which is why I think you must be thinking of a different email he did not receive or post, or you were internally misinformed about what the email was going to say).

With the email he actually pasted into the OP it is not surprising that he simply publicly notified his userbase and other interested parties that the service would be going away -- what else do you do when your upstream provider tells you the service is going away? This is all very standard and professional.

But, if you are saying that you do continue providing free elevated access to certain projects that seem worthwhile and meet some 'boudns of acceptable use', then that is nice, cool, I'm glad Twitter is doing this. (Maybe you should have told him that in the email though! And it would be great to actually advertise that fact, and what the bounds of acceptable use are, and how someone can get in touch with you to request access.)

kbenson14• 10 years ago

which provided no particular encouragement that there might be other terms available

That's not entirely correct. Under option 2 after mentioning it's commercial side, it says:

There are also other solutions that offer varying levels of access as well as historical search.

It's not prominent (likely because they only want it pursued in special cases), and it's easy to miss, but it is there.

danieltillett• 10 years ago

So I take it you are some sort of pr flack who had nothing to do with sending the email? Why doesn't the person who sent this email come here and explain why they sent it?

jontas• 10 years ago

Can you point a place in the email that communicates what you just explained in your comment? I just reread it twice and I don't see that anywhere.

My interpretation of the email is essentially: we used to offer this for free, and we're now offering a commercial alternative. You have three options: use the paid option, use the free API that does not work for your use case, or shut down.

If I'm missing something obvious please let me know.

aioprisan6• 10 years ago

In the email, we encourage people who believe their app is within the bounds of acceptable use cases on Twitter to contact us directly, and provide a link to do so.

Really? Where in the email does it ask anything of that sort? The only "unfortunate" part that I see is that this person exposed the false rhetoric and lack of flexibility that Twitter has shown time and time again. Apologize and fix it, stop trying to whitewash this.

mindcrime3• 10 years ago

our commitment to enabling developers to build on our platform

I think a lot of developers would question whether or not you guys even have such a commitment at all. Twitter does NOT have a good history in this regard. If anything, you guys need to bend over backwards, sideways, upside down, and any other way you can think of, to treat developers well and woo them. I mean, somebody needs to go full Ballmer and start screaming "Developers, developers, developers!!!". [1]

Seriously, you guys are so behind the curve in terms of developer perception that "good enough" isn't even close to good enough. You should probably be reaching out to developers, offering to fly them to Twitter HQ, and treating them to steak and lobster, etc. And that's just to get back in the good graces of the development community.

Developers do not compete with Twitter, developers make the Twitter ecosystem larger and stronger and better. Twitter needs to embrace that mindset and go all in on becoming a desirable platform to develop for.

As for myself, our app offers limited Twitter integration, but we're damn sure not going to spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter given the history and what-not.

My advice? Kill Gnip, make it trivially easy to access the firehose, commit to adhering to open standards[2][3][4][5] across the board, and put developers front and center. If you want to charge for firehose access, fine, but kill any notion of some complicated application / approval process. Make it as simple as using the API now plus checking a checkbox and plugging in a credit card number, whatever. It's 2016 for crying out loud, there's no reason I should need to fill out a form and have a sales representative call me for something like that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

[2] http://activitystrea.ms/

[3] http://www.foaf-project.org/

[4] https://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/W3C_FOSN_Position_Pa...

[5] https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/

cookiecaper6• 10 years ago

It's 2016 for crying out loud, there's no reason I should need to fill out a form and have a sales representative call me for something like that.

Sure there is. The reason is that they want to guess how much money you'll be willing to pay and have your sales rep charge you that.

Bedon2922• 10 years ago

So, Twitter is allowing their head of Developer Relations to communicate, in what appears to be an official response, under the name `CoolAssPuppy`? Really? That doesn't seem right.

mynameisvlad2• 10 years ago

Considering that was probably his Twitter handle before joining Twitter, this isn't shocking: https://twitter.com/CoolAssPuppy

hwang89• 10 years ago

Welcome to the internet? If anything, this feels more like a real response than a canned message from OfficialTwitterAccount.

gnoway• 10 years ago

It's 'unfortunate' because it reflects poorly on your company. The developer didn't do anything wrong.

The rest of your explanation is just specious, as pointed out by other people, and also reflects poorly on your company.

mindcrime3• 10 years ago

It's nice to see somebody from Twitter actually posting here on HN and all. But when the reply is, as you say, somewhat specious, it doesn't really do anything to enhance Twitter's credibility. And they are kinda "swimming upstream" in this regard already.

wslh5• 10 years ago

(Not sure why I am receiving so many downvotes, this is the first time I can talk personally with someone at Twitter about API rates. Also I am receiving downvotes in other threads so I suspect this is an orde)

Hi Prashant,

I want to pay $ 100 per month to extend the rate limit of the free API. Is this possible?

Thanks,

wslh

xfour• 10 years ago

You're just making this worse. Do you think people are not going to parse this comment line by line to verify what you imply, point by point. The fact you have a job in Developer Relations and you're trying to deflect the story because it makes you look bad, instead of just owning it is not the knee-jerk reaction you should go for.

As Twitter's platform business has matured to include many businesses building billions of dollars worth of social media monitoring and other tools, we've formalized the process to becoming a Twitter Official Partner (partners.twitter.com).

Simply because you're an even bigger company now that means implicitly that you need to change your processes, perhaps you could explain the reasoning of what was going wrong, previously.

cyansmoker• 10 years ago

My experience with Twitter:

1. Build a successful product

2. Twitter discontinues dev-friendly policies, product gets shuttered

3. Later, tweet doubts about Twitter's dev "commitment"

4. Tweet gets removed

5. Read yet another horror story about working with Twitter

6. Twitter guys claims that Twitter is "committed"

7. Turns out, previously mentioned horror story tells a different story

8. Rinse, repeat?

mgalka2• 10 years ago

Kudos for caring enough to come here and respond directly. But man, Twitter just seems to have no consideration at all for the people and businesses who build on the platform.

Every 6 months you guys make a new change that kills a bunch of websites who were silly enough to rely on your APIs. Then you give an explanation like the one above: something about needing to grow the platform, and pushing the responsibility for the problem back on the businesses.

When you killed the tweet count a few months ago, the story was exactly the same - something about depreciating it in order to build a more dependable platform, and people shouldn't have relied on it in the first place. It's clear you guys just wanted to take control of your data.

As a social network, I love Twitter. But I would never waste any time building on your platform. At every step you leave a trail of dead businesses in your wake.

cookiecaper6• 10 years ago

We need to open up computer access and intellectual property laws so that the content stream can be combed over by anyone who is interested in doing so, with or without Twitter's permission. Big companies should not have the ability to destroy small businesses just because they changed their mind about something.

muppetman• 10 years ago

Have you READ the email you sent?

tlogan2• 10 years ago

But what about this: https://twitter.com/jack/status/693296738145140736

sulam• 10 years ago

It's clear from both the clear contradictions between your statements here and the letter posted _and_ from your lack of any followup here to people that have pointed out these contradictions that you are, unfortunately, stuck with the sucky part of being developer relations for a company that often has to directly piss off developers. I feel for you!

ncallaway2• 10 years ago

In the email, we encourage people who believe their app is within the bounds of acceptable use cases on Twitter to contact us directly, and provide a link to do so.

As many others have pointed out, the e-mail from Twitter in the blog post absolutely does not state this. I add my voice to the chorus of others asking if there is an alternate e-mail, or if you and Twitter truly believe the e-mail in the blog post ever made this statement.

The owner of this app elected to blog publicly about the situation before contacting us, which is unfortunate.

Again, joining in the chorus of voices, I want to ask why it was unfortunate that the developer made a public statement that his service would be ending? In the correspondence with him it was clearly stated "On Thursday, April 21st we will remove this elevation from your account" (contradicting your claim that you "asked them to clarify what they're doing"). I would argue that the developer has the responsibility to notify their audience that the service is going to be shut down at that time.

Why is a public response anything but appropriate given the content of the e-mail that Twitter sent to him? If the situation you describe here is truthful, then don't push blame onto the external developer when the e-mail didn't come close to communicating what the Twitter team thought it did.

wiseleo2• 10 years ago

Here is a better approach for those N/A apps.

Try the app. Talk to the developer.

Template mail should not exist.

Camillo• 10 years ago

Regarding your nickname, I would like to point out that there is no such thing as an "ass puppy". Juvenile asses are called foals, like the young of other equines.

grey-area• 10 years ago

None of this is related to continuing to use the Twitter API or our commitment to enabling developers to build on our platform

It is directly related.

Twitter desperately needs to decide whether you are a platform or a closed business. If you're a platform your job should be encouraging any and all innovation on there, and have clear pricing tiers which do not result in sudden jumps from free to large charges or access cut off and directly reflect the cost to you of serving the API. You should never be in a situation where you're emailing to cut off access (and yes this notice is shutting it down).

Successful products built on twitter should be celebrated, not forced off the platform.

planetjones• 10 years ago

Are you serious? He provided the email Twitter sent. There was no indication of a negotiation or clarification there. Maybe you need to work on how you communicate.

Aissen• 10 years ago

Having tried to get firehose access for a project (three years ago), my messages were only met with silence. So I'm pretty sure it wasn't as easy you say it was.

bmm6o• 10 years ago

So, were you going to engage in any conversation here or is this just a drive-by attempt at redefining the contents of that email?

subdane• 10 years ago

I'm "confused," what in the world are we supposed to make of this tweet https://twitter.com/jack/status/693296738145140736 and this statement? http://recode.net/2015/10/21/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-apologi...

aioprisan6• 10 years ago

It means Twitter as a platform company doesn't care about keeping successful applications on their platform. Words (Tweets?) are cheap, actions speak louder. In this case, it's a resounding and massive door closing on an application that Jack said he loves and probably thought is/was good use of the platform.

developer2• 10 years ago

The telling quote from that article is this:

“Developers took to our service from day one and [gave] Twitter a much more global reach."

Twitter would not be where Twitter is today without outside developers building their company for them, through the creation of tools that users actually want to use to interface with Twitter.

Twitter as a standalone product does not have a future. Every change they make that turns more developers away from the platform continues to reduce the number of users globally who are using Twitter in some fashion. It's a downward spiral. Twitter's demise is inevitable if they continue down this path. Developers should assist them by abandoning the platform in droves. There won't be much of a platform left to work with anyway, so why bother? Let Twitter be the next Yahoo.

williamcotton5• 10 years ago

Is any of this to be expected? Twitter is a private company and they have to create artificial scarcity to sell access to their platform. We still live in a market economy, no matter how much everyone on Twitter would like to think otherwise. They're just trying to pay the bills. Treating Twitter like a public platform is a disservice both to actual public infrastructure as well as the roll of private enterprise.

halestock• 10 years ago

Twitter is a public company.

williamcotton5• 10 years ago

What you mean to say is Twitter is a publicly traded company owned and operated by private individuals. Those private individuals have rights and protections granted by the government jurisdictions in which Twitter operates.

tangled_zans7• 10 years ago

This is just... wow. The guy spends three years developing a product on Twitter's platform and they just kill it off with one e-mail? It's fair enough if they need to change their API policy, but at the very least they could have acknowledged all the work that he's done and found a way to help him and the other developers in the same position to make the transition as painlessly as possible. Not... whatever corporate BS this was.

Given how much Twitter is struggling already, is this really the time to be alienating more of its community?

Personally, I've had a really nifty side project that I've been working on since last year that I wanted to launch on Twitter's platform, but as of a month ago I've all but given up on actively developing it. All the people that I know on Twitter with whom I wanted to share it have either left already, or are only sticking around because as-of-yet there's nowhere else to go that does what Twitter does.

So I'm curious to hear some perspectives on this: clearly the direction that Twitter has taken is making a lot of devs unhappy, but what would be the right thing to do? What sort of API access would people ideally want to see it provide? What would be the ideal best-case scenario necessary for the devs to want to start coming back and putting their time into building the ecosystem?

wslh5• 10 years ago

Three hours later and have you realized that CoolAssPuppy (Twitter itself) hasn't answered any specific question? If you write in HN you expect a conversation happening.

JoblessWonder• 10 years ago

Probably because Twitter's PR people probably reached out to him and told him he wasn't helping anything and needed to stop posting. I wouldn't be surprised if they walked to his office and unplugged his keyboard.

It was bad. He posted something that made him look like an idiot or a liar. I'm not saying he is either one of those, but the post he wrote makes almost no sense when compared to the e-mail presented in the post. It is like he didn't even read it. If he was trying to say that they never sent that e-mail, then that point wasn't clear. I'm sure he had the best of intentions but it really blew up in his face.

skeletonjelly2• 10 years ago

I used to subscribe to a service that emailed me when I got a response on HN but that stopped for some reason. HN Notify I think it was called. What do people use apart from refreshing their own comment pages?

kbenson14• 10 years ago

Dan Grossman, who's active in this very story, set up a replacement[1] a while back that I've been using and it seems to work well.

1: http://hnreplies.com/

rdl• 10 years ago

Twitter fucked over every developer who trusted them a few years ago, and is now trying to recast their business as developer tools and services (since the core Twitter business probably is not a $20b business...). One of their biggest roadblocks is getting developers to trust them again.

And then they do this?

x1024• 10 years ago

The only way for them to get developers on their platform is to wait for the next generation of developers. Literally nobody will base anything on their stuff now, and this has been the case for a good few years.

grizzles• 10 years ago

Why do people keep building stuff on Twitter? All the app developers that have been fenced off should create a simple protocol to make Twitter irrelevent. Brent Simmons suggested a great way do it awhile back: http://inessential.com/2012/06/29/matthew_on_twitter_restric...

pmlnr• 10 years ago

Why do people keep building stuff on any silo?

Take a look at Known (https://withknown.com/) and Woodwind (https://woodwind.xyz/): one to have an actual website, the second to have a stream of content you want. Done.

Forget silos.

spriggan32• 10 years ago

At that point anybody whose business relies on Twitter "free API" deserves to be in that situation. It's a well proven fact that Twitter will shut down every 3rd party client or app based on their API which is a bit too popular. Never build a business on top of a "free" API, especially Twitter, because there is 100% chances Twitter will shut down you access.

jonesb6• 10 years ago

Has anyone here built a product that relies on Twitter's API for business critical features? How would you describe your risk tolerance, how long have you been in business, and do you have a personal or professional relationship with Twitter or Twitter's employees?

siegecraft• 10 years ago

This just the extract value before exit phase, right?

egfx• 10 years ago

I developed a product that connects Twitter and Facebook. I always thought that Twitter would be the enabler because of it's open street like atmosphere and Facebook would be difficult to work with because it was a walled garden. The exact opposite was true. Over time, Twitter would get more restrictive and difficult to work with while Facebook enhanced the look and feel of the stream and how the tweets appeared, emphasizing and highlighting them.

In essence I think the product spoke to the nature of the whole issue. The tweets left Twitter to seed Facebook with good interesting, connected data. Twitter would know little about the context while Facebook would get enriched context from the tweets.

Twitter doesn't want to be a dumb pipe to make apps smarter and better. They want to be the bucket like Facebook.

Twitter shut down Emojitracker's access

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