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by kaisdavis 5061 days ago
Does Twitter have a revenue problem or are people angry that they weren't consulted on how Twitter is making revenue?

I dislike ads in my stream and bad developer relations too. But the fact is they're making revenue. That's cool.

1 comments

The blowback is that they keep clamping down on their API in a misguided attempt to keep Tweets exclusively on Twitter’s properties so that more people can be shown more ads.

No one has a problem with Twitter showing ads, but reducing access to our own tweets and behaving less like a neutral platform are moves that irk a lot of us.

Thoughts from late 2010: http://alanhogan.com/twitter-betrayal

And of course the whole app.net saga was somewhat motivated by these moves.

i think not misguided.

they pay very large bills to make their platform work and people who use the API to make alternative clients are benefiting from this without paying.

No wonder Twitter is cutting them off.

Overall it is a dangerous choice to build a system based on a free API.

It’s not just alternative clients. It’s LinkedIn, Instagram, various value-add specific tools… stay tuned, it’s only getting worse.