Twitter is it’s own thing.
I remember when I first started using it. Friends would ask, “What is it?”
What they really wanted to know is, “What happens?”
A fair question, but it was difficult to explain. It’s … uh … Twitter! It ranges from personal status updates, news, link sharing, community, and even micro-blogging. Twitter isn’t short in its variety of uses, since there seems to be almost as many different uses as users.
The Twitter user base has grown from 48 million to 140 million tweets per day. That’s a lot of singing birds. No wonder that stupid whale shows up.
Last month, Twitter updated their API and they’ve tilted their strategy.
This massive base of users, publishers, and businesses is a giant playground for developers to build their own businesses on, and this means the opportunity has grown for everyone. With more people joining Twitter and accessing the service in multiple ways, a consistent user experience is more crucial than ever.
That was Twitter’s Ryan Sarver’s fancy way of saying, “No new Twitter clients.”
Even though 90% of Twitter users navigate via official Twitter apps, there have been some bad apples in the barrel:
In addition, a number of client applications have repeatedly violated Twitter’s Terms of Service, including our user privacy policy. This demonstrates the risks associated with outsourcing the Twitter user experience to third parties. Twitter has to revoke literally hundreds of API tokens / apps a week as part of our trust and safety efforts, in order to protect the user experience on our platform.
Although they are kicking new Twitter clients to the curb, Twitter realizes it can’t put themselves on lock-down. They are continuing to encourage development of publishing tools, content curation and value-added services such as Foursquare, Instagram and services like HootSuite. For those who are currently holding client app status, this is what they had to say:
We will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service.
Translation: Keep your noses clean, we’re watching.
I find it curious to see how public API’s evolve. Twitter would not be what it is today without a wide open API; however, Twitter could not continue on with their success by leaving things as they are.
We have seen the same thing occur with Google’s Android as they begin to tighten their grip on their OS. Keeping things wide-open seems to get things off the ground, but at some point, you become so large, you can’t manage or keep an eye on everything. If you don’t, the quality of the product can seriously fail.
The health of Open Source and API’s can only be as healthy as the community they are open to.
[via TNW]
Jack Wellman says
I also hear of the Google Panda that is out to crush all content from out of the search engines that is duplicated. What next?
Eric Dye says
Good question.