Game changer: Twitter rolls out expected restrictions to API use

Twitter will be releasing a new version of its API in the coming weeks, it announced in a blog post Thursday with a few changes coming for developers over the next six months that are expected but unlikely to be popular. They include required authentication with Twitter on every API endpoint, a new per-endpoint rate-limiting methodology and changes to for third-party Twitter clients that won’t necessarily put smaller developers out of business but will make their lives a lot harder.

In June, Twitter developer Michael Sippey wrote a post warning developers that Twitter was going to focus on creating a consistent experience for users, and might be restricting third-party use of its API. Twitter immediately cut off access to users reading Tweets on LinkedIn, but didn’t provide much further direction. The original post explained that Twitter would be focusing on building out in-app expanded tweets as it moved forward.

The new restrictions have three main components.

With respect to the authentication requirement, Twitter explained that many users are currently accessing the API without providing Twitter any identification, nothing more than an IP address. In the post, Twitter explained that to prevent malicious use of the API, by March 2013 all developers will need to authenticate their requests with Twitter. Developers who have already authenticated their apps with OAuth technology will “seamlessly” roll over to the 1.1 version, the company said.

Twitter will also be changing how many authenticated requests developers can pull every hour. Under the current API, all developers were limited to 350 calls per hour per endpoint, but the new version will allow for differentiation. “Most individual API endpoints will be rate limited at 60 calls per hour per-endpoint,” the post explained, but some developers will be allowed up to 720.

The most significant changes in store for developers are the changes to “Developer Rules of the Road,” which will mean a shift from “display guidelines” to “display requirements,” which all apps displaying tweets will have to follow, or face revocation of the API. In addition, Twitter applications pre-installed on hardware devices will need to be pre-approved by Twitter, and will add additional restrictions to third-party clients with large numbers of users.

The changes will have the effect of putting a ceiling on the growth of current consumer-focused Twitter clients, such as Tweetbot, and tweet-aggregation services such as Storify: two services actually called out in Twitter’s blog post as subject to stricter guidelines. (Update: In a tweet regarding some confusion over the new policies, Twitter’s Ryan Sarver said this might not actually be the case. Even though Storify was listed in the “bad” sector in Twitter’s blog post, it seems like the service might be in the clear.) In short, you won’t be able to grow a service on the back of Twitter’s service without explicit permission:

If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you’ll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you’ll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission.

Twitter explained that it wants to set the bar high for platforms where users will encounter tweets while signaling that it’s cool with apps that promote the use of tweet analytics or corporate Twitter accounts. Here’s the chart the post displayed, noting that Twitter would actively “encourage activity in the upper-left, lower-left and lower right quadrants, and limit certain use cases that occupy the upper-right quadrant.”

Twitter API 1.1 changes chart

Here’s the link to the blog post from Twitter.

This post was updated continuously as we learned more.


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/08/16/twitter-rolls-out-expected-restrictions-to-api-u...

Dave McClure Misses An Additional VC Trend…Outside Silicon Valley

There is a lot I like about Dave McClure’s post on VC industry Trends. It captures many of the trends of that are transforming the venture capital industry, particularly the bifurcation of “mega VC” and “micro VC” funds. But I think he’s missing one important trend that is happening outside of Silicon Valley.

For those of us who practice the VC craft outside of Silicon Valley, it is clear that the mega VC strategy just doesn’t work. VC can’t successfully deploy $1 billion unless they are investors in mega hits like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Open Table and the like that have the potential to generate > $10 billion exits. Nearly all of the mega hits have been Silicon Valley based. Most of the recent big successful exits outside Silicon Valley (e.g., Buddy Media, Demandware, Endeca, Millenial Media) have been in the $500 million – $1 billion range. If you have a $1 billion fund and need to generate 3x to be successful, that’s $3 billion in returns. If you own an average of 15-20% per company, that’s $15-20 billion in exits. You can’t get there $500 million at a time.

The micro VC strategy also is particularly well-suited for Silicon Valley. The successful micro VCs get into the mega-successes early, and also benefit from the high number of quick flips. Some micro VCs are attempting to make this model work outside Silicon Valley (e.g., Founder Collective, Lehrer Ventures, NextView), and are seeing early promise, but the results of that strategy is still too early to call.

What is working outside Silicon Valley is small, focused, lifecycle funds. $150-300 million in size, funds like Union Square (NYC), Foundry (Colorado), Spark (Boston) are among those that have generated the best returns for their LPs this decade. These funds, who are neither mega VCs nor micro VCs. They are in the middle. Outside Silicon Valley, being in the middle can work well because you can get in early with small dollars, like a seed fund does, but get fully behind your winners and own 15-20% for $8-12 million. When the $500 million exit is available, you take it and the fund is small enough that it has a big impact. When you have an opportunity to attempt a mega exit and it is time to raise a mega round of financing, you simply go to the mega fund.

A number of companies in our portfolio have followed this strategy. In our first round of financing, we invested $1 million in Open English, an English language learning platform. Over a few years, we kept investing as the company grew. Once the company achieved real scale, mega fund Insight came in and invested $43 million. Similarly, 10gen was at a very early stage when we and Union Square invested. As the company grew and achieved scale, it came time for a mega round. NEA led a $40 million round last quarter.

At Flybridge, we are trying to execute on that middle strategy outside Silicon Valley – a small, focused fund that will invest early and work hard alongside companies for their full lifecycle to generate solid exits sometimes and, hopefully, one or two mega exits.
So far, this strategy is working for us and others. Whether it works in Silicon Valley, I can’t say.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/dave-mcclure-misses-an-additional-vc-trend-outsi...

Microsoft Azure vs. Amazon Web Services, For Programmers

Nerval's Lobster writes "Tech writer and programmer Jeff Cogswell does a head-to-head comparison of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services from a pure programming perspective, examining the respective sides' vendor lock-in and vendor-specific APIs (among other issues). 'If you're not using any vendor-specific APIs, then it's safe to say the experience you get on either Amazon or Microsoft will be roughly the same,' he writes. 'But that means you're also not developing an app that necessarily takes advantage of all possible cloud capabilities—not just add-ons, but scalability. Your app might need to expand and grow as your user base grows.' He suggests it's ultimately a tie between the two companies. 'From a strict programming perspective, both companies have their own RESTful API, and their own libraries for using the API.'" The problem with both of these services, though, that RMS could have told you about: "The moment you start using either, you're locked in for the most part."

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from Slashdot http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/08/16/162210/microsoft-azure-vs-amazo...

Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API

At the end of June, I wrote about how we're working to deliver a consistent Twitter experience, and how we would soon introduce stricter guidelines about how the Twitter API is used. I'd like to give you more information about coming changes to the API and the migration plan while offering insights into today's Twitter ecosystem and why we're making these changes.

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from Twitter Developers blogs https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

Hey, Twitter — shouldn’t it be about the users?

As expected, Twitter on Thursday released new restrictions on how third-party apps and services can make use of the network — including caps on how much data they can access and strict requirements for how tweets must be displayed. Depending on whom you listen to, this is either a totally logical and even welcome move by a growing corporation, or a heinous betrayal of everything the company used to stand for, and a sign that it has completely lost its way. More than one observer has compared the reaction from developers to the response that die-hard music fans have when their favorite band signs a big record deal or sells out to an advertiser, and that probably sums up a lot of the angst pretty well.

Beneath all of the sound and fury from developers, however, is a kernel of truth that Twitter would do well to consider: namely, that one of the reasons why external apps and services have been — and continue to be — such an important part of the company’s growth and success is that many of its own products are frequently underwhelming at best. If the point of the new API changes is to control more of the ecosystem and the Twitter experience, then the company had better make sure that experience is as good as it can possibly be, or it risks losing the very user base it is hoping to monetize, as others have in the past.

As Harry McCracken notes in a post at Techland, the description of the changes from consumer product lead Michael Sippey does a pretty poor job of explaining what kind of behavior Twitter is in favor of and what kind it isn’t, and doesn’t really give users any kind of guidance at all when it comes to which apps or services they should feel comfortable using. The confusing table included in the post — with quadrants for different apps and obscure descriptions rather than names — obscured a lot more than it revealed, as highlighted by the fact that many people couldn’t tell whether Storify was one of the “good” apps or one of the bad ones, and director of platform Ryan Sarver was forced to try and clarify that with a tweet.

The new rules have their defenders, including some who argue that Twitter is at least providing some firm guidance for developers, since its attitude towards third-party apps and services has been the subject of a lot of fear and uncertainty. Others have made the point that placing limits on API use make perfect sense for a company that is trying to generate revenue from its network, as opposed to giving every developer with an app a free ride, and that the limits are not onerous (although Bottlenose founder Nova Spivack argues that Twitter could actually make as much or more money by licensing the use of its API).

But while the limits on API use and the requirements for how Twitter can be used may not look extreme, the message behind them seems to be clear: as entrepreneur and venture investor Chris Dixon put it: “If you make a Twitter client, you should stop and make something else.” Instapaper developer Marco Arment has a similar view of the changes, saying they are obviously designed to make it difficult for other services to make use of what Twitter sees as its core functionality — to the point where one clause about how tweets must be displayed even appears to threaten popular aggregation apps like Flipboard. As Arment put it:

“Apps cannot interleave chronological groups of Twitter posts with anything else. This is very broad and will bite more services and apps than you may expect. It’s probably the clause that caused the dispute with LinkedIn, and why Flipboard CEO Mike McCue just left Twitter’s board.”

Squashing third-party apps means pain for users

The fact that Flipboard and Tweetbot — a popular mobile client — and possibly even services like Storify are threatened by Twitter’s moves highlights an important point: the company claims that these changes are being made to provide a “consistent user experience,” implying that all it really wants is to save users from irritating or poorly designed services. But the reason why people use apps and services like Flipboard and Tweetbot and Hootsuite in the first place is that they provide something useful that Twitter doesn’t. How does throttling or even extinguishing those kinds of apps help users? Just like the decision to pull tweets out of Google search, users are the ones who ultimately seem to pay for these kinds of moves.

One of the things that makes Tweetbot appealing as a mobile Twitter client, at least to me, is that it is consistently faster and better designed than the official mobile app and has a number of useful features that Twitter’s app doesn’t. As more than one person has pointed out, the company’s mobile web app and even its regular website also leave a lot to be desired in terms of usability, and the iPad app and Mac OS X apps appear to be the red-headed stepchildren of the family — they get few (if any) updates, and in some cases may not even meet Twitter’s new display and usage guidelines.

It’s true that relatively few people use third-party apps, and so some have argued that the developer angst and outcry isn’t worth paying attention to. But if this rationale is taken far enough, it turns into a kind of “we can do whatever we want, and users will have to put up with it” attitude, and that could be very dangerous indeed. As I’ve argued before, MySpace and Digg are a couple of examples of companies that put the demands of revenue generation and business models ahead of what their users wanted, and they paid the price. They may not have had third-party developers, but the outcome was the same.

In a debate with John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who says Twitter is effectively telling developers to “drop dead,” Anil Dash argued that the company’s restrictions aren’t that different from what Apple has done with its app store and developer community. But unlike Twitter, Apple had a successful and attractive platform that developers were clamoring for access to — the platform Twitter is now trying to monetize would not have achieved much of its value if it wasn’t for the developers it is now spurning. Will it have the same value if they leave?

Not only that, but Apple’s focus has also always been on users and the user experience, and its requirements for developers — however Draconian they seemed – have stemmed from that impulse. Twitter wants to portray its changes and restrictions in the same way, but it is a much harder argument to buy. It feels as though the company’s need to justify its $8-billion market value is taking precedence over everything else, and developers — and users — are getting caught in the crossfire.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Rosaura Ochoa


from GigaOM http://gigaom.com/2012/08/17/hey-twitter-shouldnt-it-be-about-the-users/?utm_...

The Olympic Gold in Social TV Advertising Goes to…

After 10 days of the Olympic games, Ad Age did a story about the advertisers that saw the largest boost in social TV conversation. Budweiser was #1. But now, after the Olympics have come to an end, we have seen a new advertiser slide into the #1 spot…Visa. And here’s why:

Visa’s TV campaign during the Olympics had all the right ingredients to drive social media conversations – historic Olympic moments, unexpected creative twists, and celebrity power. They tapped into the Olympic archives and pulled out some of the Games’ most memorable moments including Michael Phelps’ breaking a record by a hundredth of a second and Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10, the first ever in Olympic history. They prepared creative spots that personally congratulated Phelps on his 19th and 20th gold medals, which WOW’d audiences. And, of course, there was their decision to use a celebrity narrator, Morgan Freeman.

For these reasons, Visa saw a +1,220% lift in social media conversation about their commercials. So who gets silver and bronze? Check out the infographic below for more details about the top 10 Olympic advertisers based on who saw the largest increase in conversation about their commercials.

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/the-olympic-gold-in-social-tv-advertising-goes-to/

Geology and Genesis: how Noah’s flood shaped ideas but not landscapes

While helping at a science outreach booth for a local county fair recently, I became engaged in exactly the joust I had hoped to avoid. A group of young Earth creationists who also had a booth—complete with a poster describing the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs—had landed missionaries on our shores.

I was presented with some remarkable ideas: the earliest fossil assemblages look no different from modern organisms; there was ample room on Noah’s Ark because all species present today are descended from about 8,000 “kinds” that were initially created; radiometric dating of materials has been proven not to work; rocks cannot fold (bend under pressure)—only soft sediment can; the Grand Canyon, far from clearly placing the unfathomable depth of geologic time on display, is actually definitive evidence for Noah’s flood... and on it went. It was quickly clear that the conversation was not really about evidence supporting one position or another. These folks had never gone out to study an outcrop of rock. They weren’t interested in what the rocks had to say—they already knew what the answer had to be.

It’s easy to view the conflict between religion and the science of Earth’s history as a single story arc in which science eventually overcame fundamentalist dogma. But, as is often the case with narrative-driven histories, the truth is a bit messier—and a good deal more interesting—than that.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/08/geology-and-genesis-how-noahs-flood-sh...

Indian Gov't Bans Bulk SMS, Investigating Social Media

saiful76 writes "Following mass exodus of people belonging to north-east states India from southern states of India, specially Bangalore, allegedly due to the threatening messages, the government has asked relevant agencies to scan all social media platforms to check for inflammatory and offensive content, following which, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DIT) has issued an advisory to all intermediaries in terms of provisions of IT Act and Rules to take action for disabling all such content on priority. Cellphone operators have been told to block all bulk SMSs and videos — so nobody can send a message to more than five people at a time."

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from Slashdot http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/08/18/0140207/indian-govt-bans-bulk-sms-inve...

Apple trying to woo cable operators into piping content through Apple TV (Updated)

The Apple TV as a set-top box for cable TV? That's what Apple is aiming for, according to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The company is reportedly in talks with cable operators in the US to bring live TV—as well as "other content"—to the living room, though no deals have been solidified as of yet.

The Apple TV was released in 2007 as a "hobby" device that could bring iTunes content to the television set. More than five years later, Apple maintains that it's still a hobby, despite selling 4 million devices so far in 2012 (with one fiscal quarter left to go). "It's still at a level that we would call it a hobby, but we continue to pull strings to see where it takes us. We're not one to keep around projects that we don't believe in," Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the company's third quarter conference call in July. "The 4 million is not a small number. It's small relative to iPads and iPhones perhaps, but it's not a small number."

Apple has progressively added more and more non-Apple content to the Apple TV, including access to Netflix, Hulu Plus, and some sports (NBA and MLB). But Apple's biggest challenge has always been the cable TV market, which has long resisted Apple's overtures when it comes to content. Many cable TV shows are not available on iTunes until long after their seasons are over, leading consumers to choose other options for TV consumption—often the traditional cable subscriptions Apple TV could circumvent.

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from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/apple-trying-to-woo-cable-operators-into...