If you use Tweetdeck you’ll know that the third-party Twitter client has basically been unusable for the last 48 hours or so. It’s not Tweetdeck’s fault – it’s Twitter rate limiting the app, and it’s not just Tweetdeck that is affected.
Lots of people over the last 48 hours have been switching back to using Twitter.com, and of course that can’t be bad for Twitter. Twitter recently said some more about their upcoming Streaming API, claiming that this will help eliminate rate-limits for third-party apps – but what guarantees are there that this will work? In short, like with the rest of the API, none.
Start charging
Twitter needs to figure out how to guarantee users sufficient API access for third-party apps: the demand is certainly there. In my view, the way to do that is to cut to the chase and start charging for access to the API, at least for users that are willing to pay.
This is in everybody’s best interest – in Twitter’s, in the developers’ and for users’. In a perfect world, everything would be free forever and we wouldn’t need money, but this isn’t a perfect world, and we all have to realize that money makes things work and binds us to commitments. Yes, Twitter has plenty of cash and should be able to keep everything working, but with a free API with no uptime guarantees, Twitter can frankly do whatever it wants to with that service. To put it another way, Twitter doesn’t have a transactionally-binding obligation to answer to their developers or their users that use third-party apps. If they did, we might all be better off.
Trade-offs
Of course, users will have to deal with either ads or paying to use an app, but frankly, that is the what we all do with almost any app anyway, so why should Twitter apps be any different? Also, from the developer side of things, they’ll have to spend more time on revenue streams – but again, isn’t that what they should be/are doing anyway?
Access one user at a time?
Another possible option is to only charge for API access to those Twitter users that really care about uptime on third-party apps. If it was set up like that, then we could be given some kind of code or something that we plug into third-party apps that will then let us access Twitter at Twitter homepage speeds (of course, if Twitter fail whales, then we still wouldn’t have access to our tweets). So there, I said it as clear as day: I would pay Twitter/developers for access to a personal Twitter firehose (i.e. as fast as it shows up on Twitter.com) in third-party apps. Would you?
Whatever approach it takes, Twitter needs to come to terms with this with their developers and users, as some of us want to use the apps we want to use and don’t want to be penalized for it.
Oh, and btw, Twitter can make money off of this. Fancy that.
Makes sense to me. I’d gladly pay up. I benefit commercially by using Twitter a I’ve mentioned many times on my blog. So more than happy to pay a monthly fee if it means it will work.
The problem comes when you’re paying monthly and it still doesn’t work.
Yes, that is certainly THE problem – which is probably the main reason they haven’t done it yet – they don’t trust their system enough.
I keep wondering why it’s still free. So many developers connect to it and make services they charge for and many (like myself) pretty much have come to rely on it for our day to day lives. I’d pay.
Right, and as I said, they could make it a paid service for power-users and free for people who don’t care – and always keep Twitter.com free supported by Promoted Trends, Tweets.
Interesting analysis, I hadn’t previously considered the idea of paying for a personal firehouse which I could point at any app I use. Good for Twitter but not sure how that encourages development.
Well, at some point people are going to get the message and just stop using third-party apps – also, it could be set up so that the devs get a split.
If twitter starts charging me any money, I guarantee I will quit using twitter within seconds. I am very sure I am not the only one who agrees with this. The number of users on twitter would plummet and twitter would no longer hold a commercial advertising value.
Now, if they want to charge businesses for the API go for it. Just make it cheap for start ups. Don’t ever charge users or the site will collapse over night.
I have absolutely no interest in using the website as my primary means of tweeting.
Yes, I agree that charging users would only work if it is completely optional. And yes, I didn’t go into how much they should charge, but there are many existing models for charging for APIs that are tiered and favor startups.
They could charge for the API and people would pay for API access and free users could use the website only. However, it won’t solve this type of problem, Twitter already has plenty of good people working for them and lots of money, having a revenue stream won’t fix these downtimes.
It certainly is a chicken and egg situation – I would pay them if they could give me stable access to use Twitter on third-party clients, but yeah, seems like they don’t want/can’t use my money.