…and thanks for the fish (Twitter v. Developers)

On March 11, 2011, Twitter said goodbye to some of its most loyal and passionate users.

In a message on their Development Talk group entitled “consistency and ecosystem opportunities” – they make their position clear: we no longer need you. To demonstrate this, let me point out a couple quotes that deserve attention:

Twitter will provide the primary mainstream consumer client experience on phones, computers, and other devices by which millions of people access Twitter content (tweets, trends, profiles, etc.), and send tweets.

and this gem:

More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.

Independent, 3rd-party developers have driven the progression of Twitter from an extremely simplistic group SMS service, to a massive and near ubiquitous communications system used by millions of people. As Twitter fought whales and struggled to keep servers running, outside developers were busy building new and better ways of using the service; now that Twitter has gone mainstream and is doubtlessly looking at revenue options, they’ve told these passionate users that they are no longer needed. The users that evangelized the service, and promoted it in countless ways, suffering through long stretches of downtime remained loyal and energized, pushing the service to become ever more. Twitter, it seems, has no such loyalty to these champions and flag bearers of the service.

If you want to build an application in the Twitter ecosystem now, you are pushed to the outskirts; building integration as a feature of a separate system (such as instagram), or building for vertical markets which by definition have a far more limited market potential. This is a dangerous time to be invested in an application that relies too much on Twitter; there’s no telling what or who they will ban next.

Twitter did make it fairly clear that existing applications can “continue to serve your user base” – there was an air of a threat in the statement, and given their willingness to ban a major player, I can’t help but think that they will be looking for chances to kill off other clients, to further solidify their control of what users see.

If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service.

At best Twitter has alienated passionate users, at worst they have inspired new competition with the goal of being what many of these users wanted Twitter to become, before they shifted their strategy away from the core service, to controlling and enforcing a sub-par user experience.

Adam Caudill

On Productivity

Productivity and efficiency have been passions of mine from a young age, I’m not sure why, but achieving as much as possible, as quickly and efficiently as possible has always driven much of my thoughts, actions, and plans. I was around 10 years old when I learned that there were people that specialised in worker productivity, which led me to researching process design, why restaurants are setup the way they are, the psychology of work and motivation, and a variety of other related topics.

On Apple, Privacy, and Device Control

If you’ve bothered to look at Twitter or any technology news source, you’ve seen that Apple made a major announcement: Expanded Protections for Children. This has been written about by countless outlets, so I’ll assume you’re familiar with the basics. The announcement covered a few new features being added to the next version of Apple’s operating systems, namely: Scanning of inbound and outbound messages for sexually explicit images. Scanning images being uploaded to iCloud for CSAM.

You can’t fix stupid…

For those outside of the IT field, developers are looked at as miracle workers – through us, business leaders think anything is possible (and they often see no reason why we can’t work our latest miracle by the next morning). In reality though, we do work miracles; we save companies vast amounts of money every year through increased worker efficiency and automation, we enable new lines of business that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, and reduce energy costs because we keep the office lights turned off.

Parasitic & Symbiotic Business Models

Does your business model thrive as your customer thrives, or does it drain the life from your customers? After a recent1 conversation on the impact of improved privacy tools (i.e., the eventual elimination of third-party tracking cookies), I realized that the most significant effect of these improvements would be to companies with a parasitic business model. A business model which I see no problem in disrupting. For many years, the web has existed as an advertiser’s dream2 — minimal privacy limitations, technical controls that had little impact, and a strong lobbying arm that has been able to derail many efforts to improve the situation.

Declaring War on Ransomware

It’s time for everyone from the industry, developers, and the government to declare war on ransomware and make it as hard as possible for them to ply their insidious trade. There have been false starts and baby steps, diligent fighters without enough resources, and vendors that have only given a nod to the issue. It’s time to use every tool reasonably available to stop this scourge. For so many in the industry that have dedicated so much of their time and effort to this fight, this statement may seem to diminish their efforts, but that is not my intent.