I have no clue why you'd build an app on Twitter's API anymore. I get it from their perspective (they want to control the ecosystem completely), however they've made it clear they don't care about anyone developing on them. Which is sad, since they only exist thanks to their early community of developers.
I can't believe they killed off their MacOS Twitter app, told people to use third-party apps, and now are effectively killing them off too.
(All this being said... Twitter is ripe for abuse, and locking down their API is probably one of the best ways to fix this)
They killed off the Windows Twitter app a few weeks ago too, replaced it with an iFrame to www.twitter.com
I really don't understand why a social media site so large and influential is spending so little on their own product. Twitter won't let anyone develop any clients, but Twitter itself won't develop any clients either. Twitter acts like they wished no one would log in at all, they act like they're just waiting to be acquired and shut down.
If anything you'd think they would want native apps to make adblocking harder. If you use tweetbot you dont get ads at all. Kinda why facebook pushes you to their app when you go to the mobile site.
Tweetdeck is still offered as a desktop client. Though these days its is ony available as a webapp via https://tweetdeck.twitter.com or as a Chrome app.
There was a point in time, around 5 years ago more or less, when third party twitter clients were driving a fair amount of innovation in desktop UI, particularly on OSX. As a mentor I'd even ask if my mentee would want to learn to code by pulling some stuff out of Twitter and putting it in their own design on their own webpage. There was a lot of hope and promise back then, and Twitter was giving a voice to people in harsh regimes as their other modes of contact were being shut down (like with Arab Spring). They looked like they were on the up and up.
I don't think moves like this solve Twitter's existential abuse problem, which I believe has far more to do with their 140 characters and unsolicited heckling than it does anything else. It turns your whole reality into gossip and this gossip overpowers any semblance of rational or reasoned discourse. It's intensely toxic and shutting off an API and some client apps changes nothing about that.
A follow on from this question is why you’d ever build a company based entirely on analyzing data from another company. Best and worst case scenarios:
* you do something amazing, and start making money. So your source company turns off your access to the data and makes there own version
* you never make enough money for them to care/notice you. They remove the source of data for non-competition related reasons/accidentally break the api and don’t care enough to fix it (if you’re not really making money presumably they’re not making money off you)
Shrug - maybe it’s simply a relatively easy way to get to the point where you can say enough buzzwords convincgly to get VC money?
The article explicitly said it was "bootstrapped" - ie not dependent on outside investors.
If I had a great idea for software that I could do on my own with the only investments being my time + some AWS resources where hopefully I could make enough money to pay myself a decent wage and pay for the operating expenses, why not ride the wave, make some money and when the bottom falls out, shut down the AWS resources, close shop, throw it on your resume and get job.
'you make money and then the company takes away your income' is not a 'best case scenario'. You can trivially come up with real scenarios that are much better than that.
Sorry an option is that your source company seeing you making money, and then decides to let you continue to do that rather than making that money themselves.
I can't believe they killed off their MacOS Twitter app, told people to use third-party apps, and now are effectively killing them off too.
(All this being said... Twitter is ripe for abuse, and locking down their API is probably one of the best ways to fix this)