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Twitter Explains API Changes to Employees as Limits for Third-Party Apps Go Live
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They did build replacement API’s but they charge so much to use them that few, if any, third party developers will use them. See the Google Maps API pricing for a shining example of things like this. Our firm wanted to use a single API for a single customer who wanted our app to take the GPS coordinates provided by the web browser (which would be pretty accurate since this site would be accessed by iPhones and iPads) and output the address or nearest address. They wanted $10,000 a year at a minimum. Lol. Nope...
When Tweetbot is no longer feasible, I'm done with Twitter. Such is life.
Twitter can be a useful news tool if you use it properly. I use Tweetbot, and I use it to follow a few news accounts such as CNN, NYTimes, Sports Illustrated, etc. It allows me to aggregate and view headlines quickly, though I could obviously use other services to achieve a similar effect. I also follow a few of my favorite bands which means I never miss out on a concert ticket announcement
For me Twitter is more about following news, live events, sports, celebrities, etc. I wish Twitter had better onboarding tools. They know all the blue check marks. They could categorize them into lists that people could easily subscribe to. Also they need to do a better job of displaying tweets in your timeline. Nothing more annoying than seeing a retweet or like of someone’s tweet of a live event 16 hours later. One thing I don’t get, why are users allowed to mute/block promoted tweets? To me that’s like seeing an ad on a website and being able to click never see this ad again. I admit I block most promoted tweets that show up in my timeline. I’ve got over 26K accounts blocked.
I get that third party clients using the old API are essentially getting a free lunch from Twitter. So I understand this, and yet I still don't think it's right.
There is a happy middle ground. Twitter can charge a reasonable rate for access to the API such that anyone using a third party client would earn Twitter an equivalent amount to the loss of ad revenue from those users not using their first party app. In this way the third party guys now pay fair use to Twitter, and their users can keep using an app with a superior or preferential user experience.
Unfortunately, according to the article, Twitter has already made a new API with the same functionality and priced access at $2900 per month for up to 250 accounts. Even if you have every single one of those 250 slots filled, that's $11.60 per person per month that an app developer would have to collect from their users. Taking into account Apple's/Google's 30% cut, an app developer would have to earn about $15 per user per month just to break even on fees. They certainly aren't going to make that much from ad revenue, and I don't know that anyone's third party app can survive if priced above $15 per month. This is effectively "go away" pricing.
There are 335 million active Twitter users, so at 1% that's 3.3 million people preferring to go out of their way to use third party clients.
...and that's assuming the 1% figure is true. In a corporate-talk-laden memo like that, almost certainly I'd expect that figure to be interpreted downward in every way possible to the absolute minimum.
Rob Johnson is one of the most inept product people in the entire Valley. Twitter is completely screwed until they fire him.
But the rot is at the top. Jack has no design sense. At all. Makes bad hires too.
But the rot is at the top. Jack has no design sense. At all. Makes bad hires too.
Look, I wouldn't be opposed to putting ads in the timeline if it was left chronological. I'm not against them making some $$, but this kind of decision usually happens when a company is embarrassed that third parties are running circles around them.
It's funny; instead of killing APIs, they should be unifying and consuming their own.
It's funny; instead of killing APIs, they should be unifying and consuming their own.
I’ve wound down my Twitter usage significantly in recent years. Too many extremists and trolls. Not enough value. Crippling Tweetbot means I’ll use it even less. The beginning of the end for Twitter has already happened. We’re approaching the middle of the end. Third party Twitter clients are what made the platform become successful. They deserve everything that happens to them going forward.
The average ad click on a single ad on Twitter is about $4. Then there's CPM, which is a rate that's charged per 1000 people that just see an ad in their feed. How much is Twitter losing between ad clicks and ad impressions to 3rd party apps? Only Twitter knows that but I'm sure they've looked at the numbers.
They also need to consider what it costs them to maintain the API. That cost is likely in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands each month. You've got to pay a team of engineers to keep things working correctly and add to it with time (such as when they add a new feature). Then there's the hardware cost for those systems and other resources like electricity, cooling systems, rent, and more just to make it happen, adding thousands more on top of that.
That's a LOT of offset in order to make maintaining the old API worth it for them, even if you only look to break even.
I've used Tweetbot since beta in late 2010. I'm sad to see it lose this functionality, but I also understand the cost of doing business here for Twitter.
Well I can't speak for Twitter, but I know at my company the API has to be maintained regardless whether there is a single third party application or not, because our own application uses the same API. So maintaining the API is a mostly sunk cost anyway, other than perhaps API documentation suitable for external customers.
If this is not the case at Twitter, and it's a special API for third parties only, well then I'd ask why you'd build a separate incompatible API that costs hundreds of thousands each month for maintenance with go-away pricing that nobody can afford to pay access to.
OMG I love this description.
I deleted Facebook and honestly, twitter is more useless junk. Instagram is at least very specific and to the point with minimal ads.
It must not be the case at Twitter, as they're killing the real-time streaming API for 3rd party apps but it'll continue to work within their own app.
The pricing they're charging for the new API isn't insane. It's just not meant for your app developers charing $2 for a phone app. It's mean for companies like HootSuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, Sprinklr, and others who make millions each year from access to those APIs. They charge their customers big money (for instance, it's a minimum of about $60k a month for a single company just to get in the door with Sprinklr) and to this point Twitter has made little from that.
Twitter seems to think it's special, as if it's the ONLY social media platform that matters. LOL.
Social media is a crowded arena, and gets more crowded and viciously competitive every day. One platform might be the dominant gorilla one year (e.g. Facebook), and then a couple years later it's the unloved dog of the dump (e.g. Facebook). Twitter is following FB's act….. self-inflicted injury and decline.
Social media is a crowded arena, and gets more crowded and viciously competitive every day. One platform might be the dominant gorilla one year (e.g. Facebook), and then a couple years later it's the unloved dog of the dump (e.g. Facebook). Twitter is following FB's act….. self-inflicted injury and decline.
If 3.3 million users quitting twitter wont attract their attention, I don't know what will.
I rarely use Twitter app and don't use third party apps, but such action... I guess next step is to pull the support from those APIs and leave them obsolete.
I rarely use Twitter app and don't use third party apps, but such action... I guess next step is to pull the support from those APIs and leave them obsolete.
That's not even 1% of their monthly active users. Most businesses wouldn't be hurting if less than 1% of users (who don't see ads anyways so they don't help pay the bills) were to leave.
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No one. They're not going to see an impact in stock price from this move.
Do what I do. Only use the desktop version. Twitter on a phone is... yeah. Not so good.
I won't miss Twitter if it goes away, just as I won't miss the functionality they're pulling away from people who made the effort to develop programs around their platform to enhance it.
Frankly, I never felt it was a very sensible product from the get-go? Why would I want to follow people so I can read their artificially limited in length comments, as they type them? I saw a lot of people trying to find justifications for Twitter after the fact, and many were just nonsense. (A few area hospitals used to encourage visitors to follow a Twitter account they ran that blasted out random info about specials in their cafeteria or what-not. I recall a laundromat even automating things so if you followed them, Twitter alerted you about any washer or dryer that finished and was available.) Basically? This is ALL info you had other ways of getting but people put it on Twitter because it was there.
Occasionally, you get the people with really good skills at making funny or powerful quips, so their Tweets get passed around a lot. But again, most of these end up screen-captured or re-typed and shared on OTHER forms of social media like Facebook.
After all these years, the ONLY time I've bothered using Twitter is when I'm trying to get the attention of a company I have a complaint with. So many of them pay someone to monitor a Twitter account for hashtags related to them, it's more effective than it probably even SHOULD be at getting a quick response.
Maybe I'm just getting old? But I got into computing when 300 baud modems were the latest thing and BBS's or paid services like Compuserve were all we had. Then, the net came along with all the basic tools like IRC chat, ftp clients, Veronica and Gopher servers, Usenet .... and it all worked really well, even with very limited bandwidth.
So many of the fancier "next gen" Internet standards were just re-inventions of those original tools in some way or another. And there's a LOT of overlap with most of them. They seem to try to survive, even, by stealing ideas from the others, making even MORE overlap? Never been too impressed. I'm pretty "all in" on Facebook these days, because I have so many personal friends on there and found its marketplace a decent place to sell things. But I just don't need Instagram, Twitter, or the rest of the bunch.
Frankly, I never felt it was a very sensible product from the get-go? Why would I want to follow people so I can read their artificially limited in length comments, as they type them? I saw a lot of people trying to find justifications for Twitter after the fact, and many were just nonsense. (A few area hospitals used to encourage visitors to follow a Twitter account they ran that blasted out random info about specials in their cafeteria or what-not. I recall a laundromat even automating things so if you followed them, Twitter alerted you about any washer or dryer that finished and was available.) Basically? This is ALL info you had other ways of getting but people put it on Twitter because it was there.
Occasionally, you get the people with really good skills at making funny or powerful quips, so their Tweets get passed around a lot. But again, most of these end up screen-captured or re-typed and shared on OTHER forms of social media like Facebook.
After all these years, the ONLY time I've bothered using Twitter is when I'm trying to get the attention of a company I have a complaint with. So many of them pay someone to monitor a Twitter account for hashtags related to them, it's more effective than it probably even SHOULD be at getting a quick response.
Maybe I'm just getting old? But I got into computing when 300 baud modems were the latest thing and BBS's or paid services like Compuserve were all we had. Then, the net came along with all the basic tools like IRC chat, ftp clients, Veronica and Gopher servers, Usenet .... and it all worked really well, even with very limited bandwidth.
So many of the fancier "next gen" Internet standards were just re-inventions of those original tools in some way or another. And there's a LOT of overlap with most of them. They seem to try to survive, even, by stealing ideas from the others, making even MORE overlap? Never been too impressed. I'm pretty "all in" on Facebook these days, because I have so many personal friends on there and found its marketplace a decent place to sell things. But I just don't need Instagram, Twitter, or the rest of the bunch.
