Twitter's descent into the extractive

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3328-twitters-descent-into-the-extractive

by zdw • 14 years ago

152 49 14 years ago

37signals.com

smoyer• 14 years ago

Why are so many sites crashing Safari on my iPad1 now?

lazugod• 14 years ago

Fonts is my guess.

to3m• 14 years ago

Lack of memory on iPad1 plus general lameness of Safari on iOS 5 and above, I should think. (But mainly lack of memory, I suspect - Safari is not quite so bad on iPad3.)

keithpeter• 14 years ago

The Web page containing the original article is remarkably large considering that the article is a few paragraphs of text. There are also webfonts to fetch.

ed209• 14 years ago

I wonder if jaiku.com could have kept twitter honest?

aes2562• 14 years ago

The business model is broken, the monetization prospects aren't there, and ultimately, Twitter is a fad.

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

I don't think they've released much publicly but most of the speculation I have read has said that Twitter's revenues are good. I don't find their advertising model too intrusive either which is a good sign. And with half a billion accounts and at least from what I've seen, more and more people joining, it's hardly a fad.

lewisflude• 14 years ago

Wonderfully written.

rdl• 14 years ago

At least they didn't go public and tank subsequently, and their downfall looks like it is happening before any IPO would be a risk.

Big consumer IPOs which tank hurt investor confidence across the market, and particularly in the tech IPO sector in the future.

fierarul• 14 years ago

I don't understand how such a simple service is able to block 3rd party clients. Just scrap that web site if need be!

I have an user, I can acces the site via a simple text-based protocol, who cares what weird client I'm using?

aes2562• 14 years ago

Twitter want vertical integration.

They're not quite sure what they can do with it, but they know any hope of monetization is lost if all they are doing is providing a backend for third party clients.

phillmv• 14 years ago

That's a very nice sentiment, but it won't fly if you're trying to provide third party authentication in a manner that minimizes the potential for fraud (hence, the oauth clusterfuck).

Groxx• 14 years ago

In part because scraping the website is going to break all the time, and sometimes on things you simply can't see because they're running an a/b test. Then there's usually the site TOS that explicitly denies scraping (I don't know if Twitter does, but it's standard fare).

antirez2• 14 years ago

It's as simple as this: it is extremely hard to do a big business on something that is trivially reproducible (like Twitter is), just because there is a big momentum at some point. Because the outcome is one of the following three possibilities:

1) You ruin the experience because of the business model. People switch to a competitor that is annoyances free as you were.

2) You ask for money. People switch to a competitor that is free as you were.

3) You invent a business model that is an added value for users instead to be a problem. You win.

To make "3" working you need to be open minded and design the business model for months, with creativity, thinking at your users. It's hard but you could do it, but unfortunately there are this guys that gave you millions that will ruin this process. So "3" is very very very hard for Twitter IMHO.

sks• 14 years ago

I agree with you. Inventing a new business model is difficult and can take a lot of time. While keeping a website like twitter up takes a lot of money, so they do not have the luxury to keep working on this new business model.

I guess to succeed in this business you need to have your business model figured out from the start, else you may end up making similar decisions as twitter did under pressure to make money quickly.

chaseadam17• 14 years ago

If Twitter were a utility, I'd agree with your points. But it's not, and network effect on Twitter's scale is not "trivially reproducible."

antirez2• 14 years ago

Yes what I mean is that if just the technology is trivially reproducible, if you have the network effects on your side (everybody is using XYZ), you take the leadership as long as you don't annoy users over a certain limit. In the attempt to make money it is easy to go over the limit...

markokocic2• 14 years ago

I don't understand why so many people are criticizing twitter for trying to monetize here on HN. Twitter is not a startup anymore, they have real investors and have to earn real revenue, and thus they cut everything that can potentially affect that.

Is trying to be profitable now considered a bad thing? Is selling a startup to big company that will close it down the only exit strategy that HN praise?

I know that some people feel betrayed by twitter for cutting something that used to be free. But what should twitter do? Jeopardy its own business in order to make others happy? That's not how business works.

edit: s/that/they/

ForrestN• 14 years ago

I think it's healthy and productive for a user base to complain about behavior of a company that affects them negatively. I don't hear anyone saying "screw Twitter for trying to earn money." Rather they are saying "Twitter is making itself a worse product."

I think a more interesting question is this: can a business be important, useful, and have a huge user base and yet be best suited to be a smaller company? Is it a problem with the current system that a company sometimes delivers less value to its customers as it gets bigger?

geoka9• 14 years ago

But have they been profitable even as a small company?

adamauckland• 14 years ago

The problem isn't the monetization, the problem is the shutting down of services which arguably _made_ Twitter what it is.

I was late to the Twitter game and it's running continually on my machine, but the programmer in me screams "This is a monolithic service dressed up as a protocol!". What we need is a P2P protocol which does the same thing.

majormajor2• 14 years ago

A P2P-protocolized Twitter sounds pretty non-trivial to implement at scale due to the broadcast nature, compared to email. Seems like you'd have all the same issues Twitter did internally, without the VC-backed resources to throw at them.

How realistic is it?

mtrimpe• 14 years ago

@math0ne: It seems like you've been hell-banned since your first post 4 1/2 years ago.

jaytaylor• 14 years ago

I'm confused, what do you mean?

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

I always wondering if its monetization that people are criticizing or the path. Perhaps it is a bit of both. If people have something they like, and it was 'free', and you ask them to start paying for it, well they are going to grumble. And economics tells us that for some there is no amount of money they would 'pay' to be part of the twitter universe. So those people will leave in a huff and complain loudly.

But more interestingly for me it seems that the way they have gone about this seems like they are trying to piss people off. Their actions have the same sort of uncomfortable feeling around them that you get when a sensitive relative asks how you like their plaid and striped outfit. The words conflict with the reality and its clear to everyone that is the case.

So why doesn't Twitter just charge for API access? $X per K API calls? They charged for the 'firehose' (too much though, nobody seems to want to pay that much) but still. It may be there is no pricing model underwhich the current company can survive, perhaps its the tech equivalent of Hostess.

For me is it always comes back to what they want to be, what is their "mission" statement? Is their mission to be real time news? Is it to be social situational awareness? Is it to be a highly focussed advertising channel? A club house? I wonder if they have a mission, does it tell them what to do next? If not why not?

Yes, I'm just as confused by them as everyone else.

DanielRibeiro• 14 years ago

I believe that the criticism comes from the fact that Twitter is now trying to capture more value than they create[1]. And as Tim O'Reilly had put it:

Focusing on big goals rather than on making money, and on creating more value than you capture are closely related principles. The first one is a test that applies to those starting something new; the second is the harder test that you must pass in order to create something enduring

[1] http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...

001sky• 14 years ago

For me is it always comes back to what they want to be, what is their "mission" statement?

But there are many paths. Like an architect or a slum-lord: both in the game of real-estate.

There is a difference between the hi road and the lo one. In terms of social standing.

redler• 14 years ago

I certainly don't have the answers either. But you bring up a good question:

So why doesn't Twitter just charge for API access? $X per K API calls? They charged for the 'firehose' (too much though, nobody seems to want to pay that much) but still.

Charging for API access (or the firehose) casts them in the role of a utility -- infrastructure. So too does their diminishing tolerance, such as it is, for "Twitter clients". One might imagine their investors prefer to envision the company's future not as a utility-style service upon which others build user-facing properties, but as a dominant entity in full control of all direct or derivative revenue streams, real or imagined. A utility-style valuation is not what they signed up for, so any lean in that direction is being corrected.

mdasen2• 14 years ago

The issue is one of lock-in. I think that we here on HN are a reasonable bunch. It's why I like this community. We don't begrudge our local pizza place earning profit off of us for providing us with a service. Similarly, we don't mind people in our own industry earning profit in exchange for a service.

However, when a business involves network effects, the morality changes. If WordPress.com started charging exorbitant fees, cutting off functionality, or putting annoying ads everywhere, I could simply move my blog to any number of other hosts or self-host it and none of my readers would be any the wiser. However, Twitter grew because it offered this liberal, API-driven architecture that allowed tools to flourish and whatnot. Now, we're feeling like we're in a bait-and-switch moment and we can't leave because our followers have followed us on Twitter. If we left, we could no longer connect with them. We're stuck and unless Twitter does something so crappy that we're willing to start over, we have to live with it.

Heck, if Twitter was like this from the beginning, would a competitor have gotten the growth that we gave Twitter? Let's say that Twitter and Jaiku committed to a 15-year feature set as part of a community promise in 2006. Twitter told us as users and prospective users (before we built large follower networks) that they were going to shut down third party access and plaster ads over the feeds while Jaiku told us that they would commit to ensuring third party access, but might run ads. Would we have looked at Twitter and Jaiku and given Jaiku the growth and network?

I know it's unreasonable to ask a company to commit to a 15 year feature set. I'm not suggesting that we have any rights to force Twitter to act how we deem proper. However, when a company creates a lock-in system (like Twitter does with followers) and they perform a bait-and-switch, I think we do have the right to be mildly annoyed and to point out that this might not be the most moral way of acting.

Lock-in allows companies to act against their users in a way we should be against. That doesn't mean we're against profit. For example, there was a pizza place near me that offered a large cheese pizza for $5. It wasn't especially good pizza, but it was $5 and my roommate and I loved it for that. Later, they raised the price to $7.80 (IIRC). I assume it wasn't so profitable at $5. However, at nearly $8, we felt we'd rather pay an additional couple dollars to get better pizza. We didn't begrudge the store their price hike. We didn't feel they owed us cheap pizza. Why? Because they held no power over us. We could re-make our decision as things changed.

For those of us using Twitter, we can't re-make that decision. Twitter got some of us to use their service because of things they're now taking away. Maybe other competitors would have had more traction if Twitter acted this way from the start. But they locked us in and then acted in a way inconsistent to what got them the lock-in. That's bad. It isn't take to the streets bad. It isn't quit the service bad. But it is bad enough to blog and/or comment about.

The issue isn't that we want to deny Twitter the ability to profit. The issue is that Twitter locked us in and now we feel like we don't have other options for that style of communication. Twitter has become a sort-of monopoly over that type of communication and they might start using that monopoly power not to merely become profitable, but to become more profitable than a competitive market would allow - at our expense.

In some ways, it's tough to be a monopolist. Everyone gets to take shots at you. In a competitive market, people generally don't take shots so much because they don't care: they'll just move along to something else that makes them happy. Twitter's changes are making some people unhappy. Maybe no other service could be profitable doing less - that is entirely possible. It's entirely possible that Twitter is being as awesome as possible and that they're nearly saintly in their devotion to their users needs - as much as is humanly and technologically possible. However, we don't and won't know that because of Twitter's lock-in and because of that lock-in, these changes might not feel like Twitter trying to merely continue along and earn a modest profit for its investors, but an exercise of power over us. That sounds more dramatic than I meant it to. I mean, it's Twitter, not the heart surgery that someone needs. Still, it's annoying when we feel someone isn't dealing with us in a square way. When there are loads of competitors, we can say "well, it just costs about that much to get me a pizza." When there's only one competitor, we become less forgiving because monopoly power has been levied against us in the past to our detriment. There are loads of alternatives to 37signals' products. There are loads of alternatives to WordPress.com. There are loads of other local pizza places. The same isn't true of Twitter.

markokocic2• 14 years ago

I agree with the complaint about the lock in that's the problem for some of the users. But it's a lock in only if one consider twitter vastly different than other services. I don't see it a unique snowflake. There's no a big difference between Facebook wall and twitter. That being said, I might be missing something, since I never saw any use for twitter. I would use it just for promoting my business if I were in marketing department, and seems like that's the path to monetization twitter is heading to.

Also, I can't see twitter as a monopoly. Monopoly to what? They have a monopol on SMS length message network run on internet? Yes, twitter has a monopoly on twitter. It's not like they have a monopoly in complete social and news network market.

Everyone creating a twitter client or application should have known that twitter can refuse to let it run, or change the rules. They have been pretty clear about that, and they have been doing it for a while. That's their right to do so. There is a feeling of betrayal amongst developers, but it was their choice to build a product upon platform they don't control, in the same way as iPhone developers that know that Apple can just refuse to let them in the app store, but they still build for that platform.

zem2• 14 years ago

consider this analogy: a new nightclub opens up in your neighbourhood. now there are lots of popular nightclubs in the city, so it's pretty hard for a new one to establish itself. therefore they go after the "local" market, have a relaxed dress code, don't overcharge too terribly much for drinks, and play atypical music. this works, they start becoming popular. now they're the new place to see and be seen. all of a sudden, there's one line for celebrities and another line for everyone else. dress codes have become a lot stricter, to "keep up the club's image". drink prices go up sharply. there's a new dj, who plays music the old clientele don't care for all that much, but which appeals to the new, trendy crowd.

of course, the nightclub is a business, and are just maximising their profits along good old-fashioned lines of supply and demand, and as an early patron you had no formal relationship with it, but it is far from unreasonable to feel disgruntled nonetheless.

bpatrianakos• 14 years ago

I feel the same way. Underneath all the high ideals people like to spout off about Twitter it all just comes off as sour grapes and armchair quarterbacking. Everyone knows how to solve Twitter's problem unless you work for Twitter seems to be the message but we've heard all those ideas enough times and I'm quite sure Twitter is aware of alternative ways to run the company. So are we really going to think so highly of ourselves as to think we have the solution and the people running Twitter are just morons? Large companies do some idiotic things but I think we need to give them a little more credit than that.

Now, am I saying we shouldn't blame Twitter? Of course not! The people, particularly and especially developers, have every right to be upset and the criticism of them locking down their API, changing the rules, bending the rules unfairly, and just generally acting in bad faith are justified. That said, in the end your point still stands. Twitter is a business and this is how it has chosen to become profitable. We have two choices now. Either deal with it or not use/develop for it.

In my own personal opinion, I think that despite the anti-Twitter sentiment within the developer and tech community Twitter will still thrive precisely because of what they're doing now whether it's right or not. Obviously Twitter has decided that the prospect of losing the developer community is worth the risk. Hey, that's business.

polynomial• 14 years ago

It's not (just) about monetization, path, lock-in* or sour grapes, though the first 2 figure into what really drives the interest the HN startup community has in analyzing Twitter's "pivot" –which analysis tends toward criticism for more semantic reasons.

Entrepreneurs and developers building startups want to find the best vectors to balance offering things people want with things they're willing to pay for (whether directly or indirectly) and it's thus interesting when a company that's veered to far in one direction has to change its course.

There's a judgement here (meaning in the larger discussion and not just Dalton's post) however it's more evaluative than merely moral.

*to be fair, lock-in is kind of annoying.

mariusmg• 14 years ago

I find it ironic to see the usual "follow me on twitter" at the end of the post. Yeah, people will bitch @twitter but nothing will change.

Also, Twitter has 1500 employees. That's absurd.

ianstallings• 14 years ago

I think I'm more curious about what they need 1500 people for. That blows my mind.

kryptiskt• 14 years ago

An example of what they could use all that manpower for: a real, non-trivial problem that they need to solve for a better user experience is to squash spam. That is not a fight they are winning at the moment.

Draiken• 14 years ago

Yes it's a very hard task, but you don't need 1500 employees to do that :p

joelthelion• 14 years ago

Someone should build a decentralized (p2p-based?) alternative to twitter/reddit.

This way we will finally have something we can settle on, we will have multiple competing clients and no censorship or arbitrary rules, and no monetization.

Only problem is that it may be a harder technical problem than it sounds.

georgeorwell• 14 years ago

When did the word 'extractive' become the opposite of the word 'inclusive' anyway?

Void_• 14 years ago

I'm sad that a link like this makes the frontpage of Hacker News.

It contains nothing we didn't know before, it's not interesting at all and there's no value in it. David just talks shit about another company.

Twitter's descent into the extractive

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