| our commitment to enabling developers to build on our platform I think a lot of developers would question whether or not you guys even have such a commitment at all. Twitter does NOT have a good history in this regard. If anything, you guys need to bend over backwards, sideways, upside down, and any other way you can think of, to treat developers well and woo them. I mean, somebody needs to go full Ballmer and start screaming "Developers, developers, developers!!!". [1] Seriously, you guys are so behind the curve in terms of developer perception that "good enough" isn't even close to good enough. You should probably be reaching out to developers, offering to fly them to Twitter HQ, and treating them to steak and lobster, etc. And that's just to get back in the good graces of the development community. Developers do not compete with Twitter, developers make the Twitter ecosystem larger and stronger and better. Twitter needs to embrace that mindset and go all in on becoming a desirable platform to develop for. As for myself, our app offers limited Twitter integration, but we're damn sure not going to spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter given the history and what-not. My advice? Kill Gnip, make it trivially easy to access the firehose, commit to adhering to open standards[2][3][4][5] across the board, and put developers front and center. If you want to charge for firehose access, fine, but kill any notion of some complicated application / approval process. Make it as simple as using the API now plus checking a checkbox and plugging in a credit card number, whatever. It's 2016 for crying out loud, there's no reason I should need to fill out a form and have a sales representative call me for something like that. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs [2]: http://activitystrea.ms/ [3]: http://www.foaf-project.org/ [4]: https://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/W3C_FOSN_Position_Pa... [5]: https://www.w3.org/community/ostatus/ |
Sure there is. The reason is that they want to guess how much money you'll be willing to pay and have your sales rep charge you that.