For me, the biggest problem with Twitter are their Draconian rules concerning third-party apps. I had several ideas for cool apps built on top of the Twitter API (e.g. a Twitter-based news aggregator, an online volunteering app, ...), but each time I gave up on the idea after reading the terms of their developer program:
No showing of tweets with content from other social networks, no altering in the presentation of tweets, very severe rate limits, ....
I think if Twitter wad a little less paranoid about protecting their content they could actually become a viable and useful communication tool for a large part of the Internet (even more than today).
>No showing of tweets with content from other social networks
Where does it say that? I've been working with folks and using products that do exactly that and they haven't had issues. Yes you have to display it like Twitter wants, but I've not seen any limit to also showing FB or other content.
That only applies to showing a timeline. So you can't mix @user on Twitter with @user on Instagram in the same timeline. But if they aren't grouped, no problem. It also doesn't apply if there's human selection going on, a manual process. (Dunno if you can automate that with e.g. MT, heh.)
That seems reasonable. I don't like any of this social media stuff, but Twitter has the best APIs. Maybe because they sell access, so they want it to be a good product?
There are similar clauses in the requirements that apply to single tweets, and which e.g. prohibit the display of any social media buttons like "Like", "Share" etc. along a tweet, and that are pretty strict on the formatting of the tweet content itself.
They mean you can't mix the timelines together into one timeline. That seems to make sense to me. If you have a twitter timeline (which is different than tweets being displayed), it can only be Twitter.
The way I see it, third party applications increase the value of using twitter, bringing more users to it. Twitter as a social sharing tool has very little value to me, personally, but as a chat tool, marketing tool, or customer support tool I think it has a lot of potential. Its presentation/UX is not very optimized for those experiences, though -- and that's why third party apps exist. If an open source project builds its chatroom on top of twitter, that's a huge value-add and would bring people to use twitter in order to efficiently communicate with the company, in the same way people use Slack because companies host their support on it.
By the way, I think their rate limiting is fine for most third party apps. There is a lot that can be done with intermediate caching and the Streaming API.
1) Ads via the in-line feeds [removing ads is a ToS violation, same way the real world ad networks now is basically a js/link configuration...can sell CPC this way]
2) Charge for API calls.
3) Charge for "premium membership" that unlocks the api at like $10/user/year
--- For in-house development and/or SaaS software that interfaces with Twitter. Even something like $.10 per 1,000 requests would add up pretty fast for large deployments.
These people could be milked by Twitter. Its a SaaS webapp so they can protect their API access.
3) Charge for "premium membership" that unlocks the api at like $10/user/year
--- app piracy isn't an issue if a user is paying to unlock the API for their account
Also, if app piracy is an issue because they can get ahold of your API keys, that just means you need to route it through your internal API and secure things properly. It isn't Twitters job to fix the fact you don't want to have any infrastructure.
No showing of tweets with content from other social networks, no altering in the presentation of tweets, very severe rate limits, ....
I think if Twitter wad a little less paranoid about protecting their content they could actually become a viable and useful communication tool for a large part of the Internet (even more than today).