Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes

http://www.marco.org/2012/08/16/twitter-api-changes

by benatkin • 14 years ago

131 56 14 years ago

The rules on displaying a tweet on a website seem so batshit insane I can only assume that my interpretation of it is wrong, and it should only apply to applications that provide the functionality of a Twitter client.

jmillikin• 14 years ago

Remember that these rules apply to users of the API; I don't think Twitter will come after you for block-quoting a tweet.

mechanical_fish• 14 years ago

Where's the bright and shining line between a website and an application?

If you've got any widget that uses the API the Tweets are going to have to conform, it would seem.

untog• 14 years ago

In this case, it would appear that the line is "have you just copy and pasted the text of a tweet or are you getting it from the API?"

MatthewPhillips5• 14 years ago

They sound unenforceable to me. I'm pretty sure fair use dictates I can quote a person from Twitter without regard to their lame guidelines.

jdminhbg• 14 years ago

You don't have to follow Twitter's guidelines for displaying a tweet (you're right about fair use, I think); but Twitter doesn't have to authorize your OAuth keys to give you API access either.

darkstalker• 14 years ago

I would use twitter web or the official apps if they clearly displayed the @username instead of the "real name". The latter is pretty much an useless field that only adds confusion.

I just hope that the new display guidelines don't enforce displaying the real name over the username.

cicloid• 14 years ago

This may be seen in the future as the big momement and somehow like a big favour for App.net current hype.

dinkumthinkum• 14 years ago

The problem is the teeming masses that are the ones creating all those nonsensical tweets that make Twitter so popular couldn't care less about these problems ...

kylemaxwell2• 14 years ago

If Twitter thinks I won't use <blockquote> to show a tweet when I want to, they're smoking something. That has to mean something else, right?

alecperkins2• 14 years ago

My interpretation is that it's referring to actually embedding a tweet in a way that pulls it live via the API (or otherwise presented as a tweet entity), and that just quoting someone's tweet (like one would quote an article) is still fine (how could it not be?). I could be wrong.

These kinds of specific restrictions that aren't actually specific enough and really up to their whim are troubling. Twitter needs to be careful that their regulations don't become too much of a burden on their ecosystem. The vagueness and uncertainty of their rules is the problem.

kylemaxwell2• 14 years ago

Yeah, on second reading, I was totally wrong. I went and looked at the actual document (what a concept, heh) and they are specifically talking about using applications to display or embed tweets.

I still don't think that's a great idea, but it concerns me a lot less.

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

Apparently the new rules completely obliterate the just-launched branch.com. That's incredibly stupid.

kunle• 14 years ago

explanation?

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

They disallow interleaving tweets with custom actions/content, and display styles that deviate from the default.

notatoad2• 14 years ago

What's incredibly stupid is starting a business that depends so heavily on a free third party API that it can be brought down by a rule change.

Nobody is entitled to twitter's data except twitter.

Silhouette2• 14 years ago

I just had a quick look at Twitter's terms, and it seems pretty clear that tweets are not Twitter's data. The copyright remains with the poster, and Twitter has a non-exclusive licence.

So while I agree with your basic point that starting a business so completely dependent on something that could disappear overnight is probably unwise, it seems it's really only the API that is Twitter's, not the content itself. That could be a significant distinction, depending on how this all plays out.

revorad• 14 years ago

Do you know who the investors in Branch are? :-)

protomyth• 14 years ago

Does this kill Instagram on twitter?

zdw• 14 years ago

So, what does this mean for CLI clients?

I hardly ever use them, but things like Bitlbee or the ruby twitter gem are handy once in a while...

gcr• 14 years ago

I agree. Bitlbee is eons better than Twitter's official client in terms of accessibility for the visual impaired.

politician• 14 years ago

From Apple to Facebook to Twitter, are we learning that APIs and App Stores are simply traps wherein complements are commoditized so as to drive adoption and to explore (or ripoff) enhancements?

These things seem to be win/win/win for the providers and angst/angst/angst for wannabe collaborators.

look_lookatme3• 14 years ago

I think we are learning, given App.net isn't a closed, centralized system and can't dictate usage terms for users and developers at will.

TimGebhardt• 14 years ago

But those contributors... they gave them $50 bucks. It should be whatever they think it should be!

jmspring2• 14 years ago

App.net is not centralized? Pretty sure it is. That said, Dalton has stated he intends to be more open than twitter/FB.

dasil0032• 14 years ago

I'm super excited about App.net and pretty much ditching Twitter in favor of App.net, but I'm quite sure everything you said is false.

throwa• 14 years ago

Exactly, developers seem to flock to platforms like Apple, Facebook and Twitter based on the fact that they have a large and growing user base without giving thought to this issue of commoditization of complements and how it ultimately destroy the business or livelihood of these developers.

Most people building products or sharecropping on other people's platform never make meaningful income and yet those platform prefer to announce large sums paid out to developers to encourage you to keep building complements. Apple will claim they paid out $5 billion but when spread out or divided among the numerous app developers it becomes peanut and not enough to pay their bills. You won't hear Apple give you the breakdown as that will expose them and destroy the wrong picture they want to paint to developers. Neither will they tell you that to pay out $5bn they made atleast $2billion based on their 30% cut, off your work and yet countless app developers are not making enough to live on.

They don't tell you that iOS app success is a "lottery": 60% (or more) of developers don't break even

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/ios-app-success-is-a-lo...

http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-fail...

I really hope people will think hard before building their business on the back of Apple, Facebook, Twitter or any such platform. You can use them as as distribution without making your business model entirely dependent on them and that is the way to go.

Be your own bitch and not a Twitter, Apple or Facebook bitch:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...

jopt• 14 years ago

Of course that's they way the platform pushers market it, and you're right to be skeptical. But I wouldn't call it a lottery just because very few people win.

It's a marketplace; why would anyone expect the profits to be shared among the vendors? Saying there is a lot of money changing hands is not dishonest.

phereford• 14 years ago

While I hate to blindly agree and lump all these successful companies into API traps, you are pretty much right. From a business standpoint, if Facebook (or any other API company) sees massive growth/activity in an application on its platform, you better believe they are going to take notice and have some course of action.

You can even throw LinkedIn into this group (http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012/06/21/linkedin-shuts-do...).

The main aggravation/issue stems from developers wanting to use these APIs to gain access to users without fully qualifying the risks. I could easily be building a fantasy sports app on Facebook thinking, "they won't EVER get into this market. They have much bigger problems to solve." 2 years later, they get into the space and shut me down because I am a competitor.

These "wannabe collaborators" are not trying to improve the experience on said platform. They are trying to gain access to a vast database of users with low barriers of entry and an easy to use(/abuse) marketing channels. It's unfortunate that no one has the foresight into understanding where a company as large as Facebook/LinkedIn/etc may pivot into, but only insiders really have first hand knowledge of this sort of thing.

lukifer3• 14 years ago

Question: is there anything stopping an app from using an invisible embedded web view to pull content from Twitter, mimicking a plain browser, and then scraping the content from the DOM as a poor man's API?

It would be tedious as hell, especially now that Twitter is all-Ajax-all-the-time, and it would be a moving target as they made changes, but could Twitter really do anything to stop it?

poblano2• 14 years ago

I was going to ask that exact question.

I think the answer is no, they can't stop you. And perhaps I'm being naïve, but it doesn't seem like it would be too terribly tedious if you used a scraping library, at least not for replacing basic API functions (i.e. getting a user's recent tweets).

Obviously this would be limited to public tweets (no private tweets, no tweeting on the user's behalf, and no DMs).

natrius2• 14 years ago

"Obviously this would be limited to public tweets (no private tweets, no tweeting on the user's behalf, and no DMs)."

I don't think any of those limitations apply. If you can do something via a web browser, you can do it programmatically, depending on how much pain you're willing to endure.

MatthewPhillips5• 14 years ago

> Question: is there anything stopping an app from using an invisible embedded web view to pull content from Twitter, mimicking a plain browser, and then scraping the content from the DOM as a poor man's API?

Yes, it's called iframe busting. You can't force a page into an iframe that doesn't want to be there.

lukifer3• 14 years ago

Doesn't have to be inside an iframe; it could be an undisplayed UIWebView, or even a headless process such as PhantomJS.

akkartik• 14 years ago

I find myself wondering: why the heck do I even have a twitter account? I hardly ever use it anyway. A political gesture is as good a reason as any to simplify my life.

Turns out I need it for authenticating a couple of external sites. But its days are numbered..

joewee• 14 years ago

I can't understand how this affects companies like twitmusic.com which just closed a round from 500 startups. Or perhaps disqus.com which has a lot of integrations with twitter in their app.

Can someone shed some light on this?

imaginator• 14 years ago

Wow. This all seems very micro-manager-y.

Now I'm curious how Twitter will respond: some open souce developers are working on integrating Twitter posts to buddycloud. That means Tweets will be displayed in a buddycloud channel. How exactly does twitter expect someone running a twitter-buddycloud gateway on their domain. Additionally buddycloud channels (containing tweets) can be displayed in a text client ala https://github.com/Schnouki/bccc#screenshot Are we expected to <blockquote> our VTs? :)

rhizome2• 14 years ago

If the hue and cry raises to a high enough level, they might back off a little. "Ask for twice what you want," etc.

Kerrick• 14 years ago

What does rule 5a, "Tweets that are grouped together into a timeline should not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other networks," mean for Gwibber and other desktop social clients?

MatthewPhillips5• 14 years ago

It means they're going to have to remove Twitter.

Twitter doesn't want to be abstracted away as just another stream of messages.

ojbyrne• 14 years ago

Great timing for app.net.

Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes

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