New Twitter Policies Put the Kibosh On Mashup Services 82
dburr writes "If This Then That (IFTTT) is a web mashup service that lets you connect together multiple services in unique and powerful ways. For example, you can automatically bookmark Favorited tweets using a social bookmarking service such as Delicious. Or even notify you by SMS when your server goes down. Unfortunately, Twitter has just announced policy changes that will in effect neuter it. Starting next Thursday, August 27, IFTTT will be disabling all Twitter "triggers" (the real power of IFTTT and its defining feature). (You will still be able to post Tweets through IFTTT) This has upset many long time Twitter users and members of the technorati. I have created a petition in a valiant (and perhaps vain) attempt to express our displeasure at their decision."
Oh, an online petition? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's sure to stop them.
I'm not sure what Twitter thinks it is doing, but what it is doing is alienating a wide variety of people. They've stopped development on the Mac desktop client, destroy the iPad client, neutered third-party clients, prohibitted several forms of useful integration, and the list goes on.
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Re:Oh, an online petition? (Score:5, Insightful)
Petitions have never worked, not even in the "old days".
Much like boycotts, they depend on getting a significant fraction of a company's customer base to participate. And put bluntly, on any scale larger than your friendly neighborhood greengrocer, you just won't get enough people to participate.
So it really comes down to a simple business decision - Twitter decided to alienate some portions of its user base for a reason. They already know it will piss some people off, and they have already decided they can accept that.
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Three cheers for Twitter! Even though theyre in the same category its the thought that counts!
Re:Oh, an online petition? (Score:5, Interesting)
The petition itself won't stop them (though who knows, it got Dark Souls on PC after all...), but it's symptomatic of something much bigger.
If Twitter doesn't want to become the next Digg, they should listen to their audience more.
Re:Oh, an online petition? (Score:5, Interesting)
I never got the point of twitter. I have an account and followed the people I know from various blogs and ended up whittling away the morons who'd post inane content. It's like they swallowed stupid pills. It seemed that a high percentage of the bloggers who are erudite and have great content on their blog would allow garbage on twitter. I quit logging in, I'm about to fart loop the email address on the account by changing it to their autoresponding yet otherwise worthless customer service email address.
A Petition?!! That'll Show The Bastards! (Score:3)
Yes, yes, it's easy to mock online petitions and their traditional worthlessness, but THIS petition has been written by a member of the "technorati," so maybe it has a chance.
God Speed, Brave Technoratus! Make Us Proud!!
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Re:A fucking online petition... (Score:4, Insightful)
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If your life depends on (Twitter | Facebook | Government Money | Sports), you don't have one.
FTFY.
Depending on government money (Score:2)
If your life depends on Twitter, you don't have one.
If your life depends on Facebook, Government Money, or Sports, you don't have one either.
In the industrialized world, whose life doesn't depend on infrastructure paid for with taxpayer money?
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If your life depends on (Twitter | Facebook | Government Money | Sports), you don't have one.
FTFY.
We have public health care in Canada, paid for through government money (although it originally comes from taxpayers)
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A fucking online petition is not valiant
It is if you are doing it from your mom's basement [penny-arcade.com]
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Classic PA comic. The only time a webcomic has caused me to change my behavior (AFAIK).
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How many lattes? (Score:1)
How many lattes does one have to drink to become a member of the technorati?
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In my day, the techno-rati [youtube.com] had an entirely different role of getting drugged up, sitting around in cafes/parks and listening to mind numbing music while thinking they were doing things which would change the worl... oh wait.
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Actually I'm pretty sure that " long time Twitter users and members of the technorati" are mutually exclusive classes.
Twitter replacement? (Score:1)
Long past time for someone to come up with a Twitter replacement.
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Have a look at app.net, then. It's aiming to be what Twitter could have been.
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App.net runs afoul of my "first in place" theory of incrimentally improved replacemts for existing entrenched internet services.
No matter how bad Twitter, Facebook, or [insert object of your rath] are, they will remain in place until some new facility arrives with a fundamentally different and novel approach.
We are stuck with twitter for the next ten years. It may evolve, and lose the 140 byte limit, but the idea of announcing, to the world at large, that you are having tacos for lunch somehow appeals to a
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Just use an rss feed.
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And I will start saying: we need a Twitter and Facebook/G+/Orkut/whatever replacement that is distributed, anonymized and cryptographed. The best project so far (to my knowledge) is Secure Share [secushare.org], but it is far away from reaching its goals. If I had more time I would definitely try to help them, or do something along the same lines. One thing that could be a huge head start would be to use the gnutella network as transport, implementing new GGEP extensions. They (secushare) use gnunet as transport, but I thi
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Long past time for someone to come up with a Twitter replacement.
How about "no Twitter"?
WordPress.com Implements Twitter API (2009-12-12) (Score:2)
Date is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Date is wrong or this story is a month late. TFA says "Starting next Thurs, Sept 27, 2012". Also August 27, 2012 was a Monday.
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That's not his fault. He never got the notification.
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Naw, it was just his IFTTT rule.
IF twitter changes the TOS THEN wait a month before complaining.
Nothing of value lost (Score:1)
technorati ? more like just a bunch of twats whining about their inane life that nobody cares about
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RSS has been around since forever, and Usenet (oh, Usenet!) since forever and a day.
Twitter has served and never will serve any useful purpose. It's just an entertainment tool, like Facebook. And no-one really cares about whether entertainment is "decentralized" or using "open standards" as long as they don't have to think.
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Twitter has served and never will serve any useful purpose.
Some people use it to obtain news, and it has delivered earthquake warnings ahead of other systems. I would say Twitter does not hold a monopoly on this kind of communication. It was available prior to Twitter and will be there after Twitter is long forgotten. Twitter is a marketing phenomenon. It gives the externally-directed types (sheeple, the majority, people who vote for the candidate with the biggest ad budget, whatever you like to call them) something to rally around. That there are so many othe
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Some people use it to obtain news, and it has delivered earthquake warnings ahead of other systems.
Of course, it's now against the rules to use the Twitter API to detect tweets about earthquakes and notify you about them. You can data-mine Twitter after the fact in order to create nice news stories about how Twitter was the first to know about the earthquake (so long as you pay them lots of dosh), you just can't do anything useful with that at the time.
Um, some problems. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Why is this front page? This is the result of the API and policy changes that twitter announced what, a month ago? two months?
2) Yeah. An online petition. That'll learn 'em.
Re:Um, some problems. (Score:5, Funny)
2) Yeah. An online petition. That'll learn 'em.
Didn't you hear? It's valiant.
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2) Yeah. An online petition. That'll learn 'em.
Didn't you hear? It's valiant.
I assumed they meant that Prince Valiant [blogspot.com] was organizing the petition.
Sorry, if he's not involved then I'm not interested.
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It's not even a result of violating the API changes; it's a result of the redistribution of the Twitter data, which has been technically verboten all along, but is only getting cracked down on now (along with everything else.)
Yeah that's how it generally works. You let it go on for a while... then it builds momentum... then it goes on more and more .. then suddenly you decide to "crack down" on it now that lots of people have become used to it.
... " and the answer is along the lines of "yeah yeah yeah, don't call us, we'll call you mmmkay
It's like the way government deals with tragedies. Years earlier, someone may have tried to tell them "you know, this procedure is unsafe, if it does go wrong someone could really get hurt
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I guess prevention just isn't as sexy as overreaction?
And you might prevent the wrong things.
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I guess prevention just isn't as sexy as overreaction?
And you might prevent the wrong things.
Likewise, the one tragedy that DOES unfortunately hurt/maim/kill someone could have been a one-time event.
So clearly, we should never do anything about anything. Right?
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So clearly, we should never do anything about anything. Right?
You could do worse.
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Actually, I don't think it used to be against the rules to (say) use the Twitter APIs to automatically create a summary of your own tweets each day and post them to your blog, or dispay them in a live sidebar, or anything else you'd like. It was only the recent API rules change that forbade all that. According to the current rules, the only way you're allowed to export your own tweets from Twitter is manually to a file on your own computer. Any other method of exporting, including automating the download-ne
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Not even that, no. IFTTT has been in violation of Twitter's TOS since before any of the big changes were announced [techcrunch.com].
Frogskins (Score:1, Redundant)
Free services are swell, but whining when you're getting what you pay for seems specious.
I guess their users are quite angry (Score:2)
All 5 of them have signed the petition (assuming it wasn't signed by the owners/developers).
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All 5 of them have signed the petition (assuming it wasn't signed by the owners/developers).
It's gone viral- 24 have signed. I'm starting a petition to have Mitt make more hidden camera videos, they're funny.
all twitter clients should just start scraping. (Score:2)
yes, that's right. they should just do pseudo browsers.
anyhow, twitter is just fucking itself with all this. you'd think myfiasco would have taught them something.
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yes, that's right. they should just do pseudo browsers.
anyhow, twitter is just fucking itself with all this. you'd think myfiasco would have taught them something.
If people ever observe the history of how similar ideas played out, prior to trying such an idea, they are careful to hide all evidence of it.
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i would bet, twitter starts premium access for services, which can pay for it. And favstar will.
Crazy (Score:2)
Homework for the reader: Rewrite that in 140 characters.
Re:Crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect one of the biggest reasons why Twitter keeps changing their rules/policies/etc to block these "new ways to make Twitter useful" is because all these alternative ways to consume tweets dont put their "promoted tweets" and other forms of revenue raising front-and-center like the official approved methods do.
A brief, but popular opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
It's an internet cliche, but still applicable:
And Nothing Of Value Was Lost
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No insult intended; just an observation.
Valiant online petition? (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to really send a message to Twitter against this policy? Stop using Twitter.
I quit (Score:3)
I was using Twitter pretty actively for a few years. It never was a great service, but it was simple, widely used, and had a lot of useful add-ons. But function after function has disappeared, making Twitter pretty much useless for me. So I quit.
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Why was this modded down? Is it trolling to suggest an alternative? Twitter has become a simple human-redable platform for applications - perhaps the most important reason for its success. Now, because it's a closed, for-profit enterprise, the power it has is leading it to exert control over the open market it originally harnessed gain popularity because it needs to push advertising to anybody who would like to use the platform. I believe that it is critical for a communication platform to be at least i
mashups not the problem (Score:3)
I really have no problem with this. Mashup services just ride on the back of the people who do the hard work. Besides, these kinds of services are mostly used by geek and geek press. All the Silicon Valley rags will wag their tongues for a bit and go back to their lattes.
What I do have a problem with is the general move towards Twitter circling its wagons, and signalling that all unofficial Twitter clients will eventually be cut off. This is just a dumb move. Clients like Tweetbot will always offer more innovation because the guys at Twitter have not shown they care about their product or have the ability to really innovate. They're finally trying to figure out how to make money from Twitter, but so far it's just fumbling around. They'd be better off at least taking a cut of the profits from all 3rd-party Twitter services/clients that charge money.
Bah (Score:2)
Forget the petition - start a 'new twitter (twatter?) service that doesn't block useful features -