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Social Networks Programming Twitter

Twitter's Relationship With Third-Party Apps is Messy -- But It's Not Over (mashable.com) 26

Posted by msmash from the tussle-continues dept.
It's a day that developers of some of the most high-profile Twitter third-party apps have dreaded, though it's one they've long-known was coming: Twitter is finally shutting off some of the developer tools that popular apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific have heavily relied on. From a report: With the change, many third-party Twitter apps will lose some functionality, like the ability to instantly refresh users' Twitter feeds and send push notifications. It won't make these apps unusable -- in some cases the apps' users may not even immediately notice the changes -- but it's a drastic enough change that developers have mounted a public campaign against the decision.

Now, Twitter is finally weighing in on the changes, after months of publicly declining to comment on the state of third-party Twitter clients. The verdict, unsurprisingly, is complicated. The company is adamant that its goal isn't to single out these developers. The company is retiring these APIs out of necessity, it says, as it's no longer feasible to support them."We are sunsetting very old, legacy software that we don't have an ability to keep supporting for practical reasons," says Ian Caims, group product manager at Twitter. At the same time, though, the company has also made a conscious decision not to create new APIs with the same functionality. Here's how Twitter's senior director of product management Rob Johnson explains the move: "It is now time to make the hard decision to end support for these legacy APIs -- acknowledging that some aspects of these apps would be degraded as a result. Today, we are facing technical and business constraints we can't ignore. The User Streams and Site Streams APIs that serve core functions of many of these clients have been in a 'beta' state for more than 9 years, and are built on a technology stack we no longer support.
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Twitter's Relationship With Third-Party Apps is Messy -- But It's Not Over More

Twitter's Relationship With Third-Party Apps is Messy -- But It's Not Over

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  • They are keeping the data inhouse and like another develpoer said, time to start scraping their website like a 1997 hobo

    -dk

    • Agreed. They're slow-rolling or outright not approving new developers. Nearly all of the interesting use cases are now impossible with the API limitations in place, with the very narrow exception of specialty tools for the enterprise. (And enterprise spending on social is way down because after years of trying there's no demonstrable ROI.) So, yeah, the relationship is messy. Like the results of a knife attack.
  • And 80% of the non-bot 20% is just marketing people trying to tune the system. If they kicked all those people and Bots off, they would realize that actual consumers moved to other social platforms years ago.
  • Twitter makes nothing from the app developers using these APIs. In addition, the API stream doesn't have ads, so they make nothing from those who use 3rd party apps. They have to spend money maintaining these APIs and make nothing in return. Imagine you were a business manager responsible for revenue at Twitter, or a programmer/engineer tasked with maintaining the APIs. Would you think it's a good move to continue to maintain them?

    • Re:Consider The Cost (Score:4, Informative)

      by Elias Israel ( 182882 ) <eli@promanage-inc.com> on Thursday August 16, 2018 @07:28PM (#57140560)
      Or, you could implement the shared monetization stream for them that Twitter *promised* aeons ago. (And entirely failed to deliver.) Nope, this is about taking the user experience entirely back for themselves and forcing everyone onto the web platform where they can utterly control what you see and what you can say. Sell your shares: Twitter is dead.
      • Hahahah, you have to be kidding. The percentage of people using 3rd party apps is a minority. This won't have much impact on them. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn all make users us their official app only and they're all somehow surviving fine. The sky isn't falling Chicken Little.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Sebby ( 238625 )
      And this is the reason Twitter has any users left at all – their own app is crappy, the website even worse. The only thing that makes Twitter useable are the third-party apps.
      • And yet, the vast majority of their users don't use 3rd party apps. I get that you might not like the official app (I've used Tweetbot since it was in beta in late 2010) but the fact is that the vast majority of users use the website or the official app.

    • They could put their ads in the streams or put requirements about the developers putting their ads in by specification. But they don't. I don't know what they're on about, but if the 3rd party apps become unusable, I won't bother with Twitter anymore. It's not like they even have a Mac app, and their apps on other platforms are marginal in quality.

  • How do I view the tweets in chronological order without my Chrome extension?
  • The one thing that made Twitter reliable and usable for me was the chronological timeline, and the only way to get that was third party apps. Without that, the app is useless for me, and a lot of other people who rely on it for getting important updates. I'm expecting a mass exodus soon.

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