Since this time last year, Twitter has grown from 48 million to 140 million tweets a day. And the notoriously open platform took a big step today. Twitter’s Ryan Sarver just made an announcement involving Twitter’s updated API. We’ve published excerpts below but, the take away: no new Twitter clients.
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.
Sarver notes that this was Twitter’s motivation for buying Tweetie and developing their own official iPhone app. It is the reason they have developed official apps for the Mac, iPad, Android and Windows Phone, and worked with RIM on their Twitter for Blackberry app. As a result, the top five ways that people access Twitter are official Twitter apps. According to Twitter, 90% of active users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.
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.
Twitter is obviously concerned that consumers will be confused by third-party Twitter clients, and that the potential for a fractured landscape and poor design elements will drag what its amazing service down. Can you blame them for wanting to curate a consistent user experience? To ensure this, Twitter has updated its API terms. The “Developer Rules of the Road” begin with the following paragraph:
More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
Twitter encourages development in the following areas such as publisher tools, curation of content, realtime data signals for ranking and ad targeting such as Klout, value-added content like Foursquare, Instagram and Quora and social CRM clients like HootSuite. For existing developers of Twitter client apps will be allowed to continue, but Saver writes,
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.
Bottom line: All of the apps you use and love that work with Twitter are probably legitimate. It sounds like somebody found a way to abuse Twitter’s API policy. Twitter is also likely trying to protect its promoted Tweets and Topics business strategy.
As Twitter’s ecosystem continues to grow beyond 750,000 registered apps, it seems the startup is growing up and choosing its friends more wisely.
with many twitter clients fracture access to the official website, this may be right move for Twitter. but can prove harmful if tweetdeck launches (with some reports recently) it’s own service. other may join the party if beneficial.
Confused customers? Sheesh Twitter, it ain’t exactly rocket science. How about they ditch that ridiculous Quick Bar first before making any further requests?
Official client is a something from other planel.
I use Twitterific on iPod/iPad and Itsy on Mac. And love them!
Official client is a something from other planet. I use Twitterific on iPod/iPad and Itsy on Mac. And love them!
At the end of the day, the bottom line is this. In order to protect your monetization streams, you need to control the user experience from end to end — web and mobile. If you’re banking on Promoted Tweets and Trends and they aren’t being utilized by other mobile apps, its a problem for you.
This is yet another move on Twitter’s part to let developers know they do not care about the tech ecosystem that was responsible for their success. Twitter didn’t gain traction until they released their APIs for developers and now those same API freedoms are being taken away.
While its true that you shouldn’t build a business on someone else’s business, at some point you do have to believe (even if in a naive way) that you are contributing to that core business’ success. This was the battle cry in the early days of Twitter — use our APIs and build something cool. The fact that independent developers took that notion and created Twitter clients before Twitter thought it was necessary is rather funny.
But Twitter, let’s be clear in your actions and motives. Don’t disguise the truth and I’m sure the developer community would respect you more. I smell “Apple MUG” all over their latest moves.
Twitter invited developers to build new apps by releasing an api, and also invited people to resyndicate content by providing RSS feeds. Now they are changing their minds, at great expense to a lot of developers that have invested their efforts in working with and promoting the Twitter platform – and making it a success. In doing so they are going to upset a lot of people and create a lot of enemies.
In order for the web to develop people have to let go of their previous ownership mentality and learn to let go and share – this move is driven by greed and is very backward thinking – 1.0, not at all 2.0. Twitter should be able to work out a way of monetizing without looking to get control of the web.
Twitter are privileged that the world has put their confidence in it and shares all our conversations with it – and now they believe that they own the world’s conversations. Wrong. Ethically wrong. And it seems that journalists are tiptoeing around the edges here so as not to offend what has become a giant.
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