DISQUS

bpm140 · 1 year ago

Twitter started pushing their XMPP feed to Gnip this morning. Notifications for everyone! http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/18/twitter-pl...

Indus · 1 year ago

Do you think twitter users should share the burden? a la Amazon's Alexa API which charges pennies for every 1,000 requests. I don't necessarily advocate charging the end-users but maybe the services which make more than 5,000 requests per day.

Indus

greggo · 1 year ago

Sounds like a very reasonable business model. I have a feeling that's what we're going to see from Twitter soon. Maybe they should have rolled out the payment plan before turning off the tap though.

ceonyc · 1 year ago

I don't pay a direct fee for the tap water I use in my building, but I'm pretty sure if I started bottling the stuff as a business, using thousands of gallons a day, the management company would track down which apartment was using all that water and ask me to stop.

Anyone who builds a service depending on more than a request a minute from a single data stream should realize they're treading on very shaky ground. I have little sympathy. If you were GM, you wouldn't have one and only one brake supplier... having one supplier is just not a good business strategy at all, so these Twitter apps are risky propositions from the start.

LH · 1 year ago

Building a business on use of another business's API, and being a drain on that business's resources, and not supporting that business financially. No room for complaint in my eyes. This sounds like a smart move by Twitter.

Jay Cuthrell · 1 year ago

The ability to curtail traffic selectively is a hallmark of maturing service platforms.

Now, witness the power....

gregorylent · 1 year ago

is twitter on the way to evil? walled garden? or just trying to breathe? trying to get control over competitor's?

dunno

but damn good reporting mr. gray

A3PixitesMunier · 1 year ago

so gold is the only option for Twitter? all these silver, bronze parties just don't count? who was it that said; participating is more important than winning? it sure is true; all that twitters is not gold.

nogg3r5 · 1 year ago

Twitter is surely circling the plug hole. I'm impressed that they have managed to stay alive this long!!

Thejesh GN · 1 year ago

This was bound to happen.
I guess you should use twitter search api (summize) get public data instead of regular api.

Pete Prodoehl · 1 year ago

Does this help illustrate why we need a open and federated microblogging solution?

Nick Halstead · 1 year ago

Hi Louis,

Our side project http://www.tweetmeme.com which was the first twitter URL tracker has now been down for months because we were offered the use of the XMPP feed and by the time we had implemented they pulled it. We will not bring it back up again or put development effort into it unless these kind of restrictions are a thing of the past.

It is a real shame because twitter became strong because of a really simple to use RESTful API that developers flocked to, by restricting access they are cutting off what made it what it is, this can only have a detrimental effect in the long term.

Christopher Blizzard · 1 year ago

I had the same problem with whoisi.com which used the unauthenticated API as well. However, once I made the request they quickly whitelisted an account for me to use and I was back up and running in very short order.

I would happily use the authenticated API if it means that twitter can offer better service to its users and people like me that are using it in ways that twitter did not expect.

Matt Galigan · 1 year ago

So I'd just like to chime in as an API user. While Socialthing! uses the authenticated API and we're not at all affected by this, we have similar restrictions at other sites. Up until now, Twitter had really been an anomaly when it comes to how their API is served up (in both authenticated and unauthenticated calls. First off, almost every single other site out there with a popular API has rate limiting on the IP level. Yeah, it sucks, but there's really not many other ways of doing it until push comes to pass. Gnip is a solution for sure, but those same API providers need to plug into Gnip for it to happen.

Twitter is just coming to a point where they're realizing that they can't easily sustain their previous models. Anyone that is currently using unauthenticated calls will soon be able to pull from Gnip to be able to optimize their calls (and likely, be more accurate than they were before).

APIs are a tough game...both on the consumer and the producer level. Twitter understands that their developers are their lifeblood, that's why they're working hard to improve the service for all. I think it's safe to say that the reason they're bumping up the auth'ed calls, and down the unauth'ed calls is because more people actually interact with services that are authenticated. Think Twhirl, Twitterrific, Socialthing!, etc. Now, the non-authenticated services are probably pulling far more data at a much larger detriment to Twitter, but most of the activity isn't going on with those places. This move is a very positive thing for the API as a whole, and you can rest assured that they will likely have other solutions for folks that simply can't auth the API going forward.

Great post, Louis

ekivemark · 1 year ago

Great analysis!

Kevin · 1 year ago

To me this seems to be a good opportunity for Twitter to bring in a little extra cash. Why not offer up the 100 req/hr for free, and charge for anything beyond that? Given the choice between "dying a slow death" and paying a reasonable fee for access to a valuable service, I think many developers would prefer the latter.

Richard Cunningham · 1 year ago

At FriendBinder I think we have this under control now, as long as people authenticate for Twitter: http://blog.friendbinder.com/2008/07/changes-to...

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Noah David Simon · 1 year ago

why does anyone care? forget the technical problems. the real issue here is that twitter failed to be a free forum for free expression and is censoring any parties that question their ever changing policy. twitter is dead and it isn't because it doesn't load... it is because their hearts were up their asses