This should get interesting.
I've worked on a social media engagement/publishing/ads/analytics platform before, with some well-known brands using our software. From an ad and engagement standpoint, no larger or international company in their right mind is 'Twitter only' or for that matter even Facebook only, and a lot goes into ad campaign planning, execution and analysis, as well as social media support and engagement. This is one reason companies use this party software, free effectively aggregate across social media platforms, as well as other media.
I've been out of that domain for a little while now, but we had several direct lines into Twitter, with rarely much hope of improvement. API limits would be hit for a single large customer while there wasn't a clean way to effectively handle limits per customer. Discussions on raising those limits seemed to lead to crazy costs that would have caused problems with our small and large customers alike.
I don't follow social API changes like I used to (have to), but for companies bringing higher engagement, more company posts and ads to social media platforms, this could well cause a lot of issues and ultimately, lower engagement on Twitter from businesses...businesses which ultimately are how Twitter makes a good chunk of any $$ they have coming in.
Make it too difficult on both individuals and businesses, and inevitably the platform dies.
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Costs a lot of money to keep an API going. Seems most here don't understand this. Lots of crying going on. Twitter won't miss those that stop using it because of this move. You were just a leech on their system anyways with your 3rd party app and lack of ads.
That depends on which APIs are impacted. For companies using ad or engagement software to work across multiple social media and other platforms, including comparisons across each platform, eventually they may well decide to de-prioritize Twitter activity (read this as reduced ad and other revenue to Twitter).
This isn't solely a Twitter issue in trying to force people to go native, but it's also painfully unrealistic for global companies using third party software for ads, engagement, brand monitoring, sopport, research etc. It will be interesting to see the net effect, as this third party software in itself drives higher business engagement and $ to Twitter than if Twitter or others made it increasingly painful to need to go native client or web onlyl
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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.
Bear in mind, no large company sees Twitter as their top target platform, let alone the only one. That's where some of the value of those apps come in, as well as managing cross-platform ad campaigns, brand awareness, engagement and analytics. Datasift and Gnip were thirdparty companies Twitter forced on other third party companies, as Twitter didn't provide the capabilities needed...and Datasift was certainly not cheap by a long shot for firehose data, most of which funneled back to Twitter. Meanwhile, Twitter API limits caused real problems for bigger single customers, let alone companies like mentioned above who are servicing hundreds of companies.
And yeah, Sprinklr definitely isn't cheap, but those types of software are servicing companies giving $$ to Twitter that might be otherwise reduced if forced to use only native Twitter tools vs a more centralized cross-platform third party tool.
