Your Twitter app stopped working? Here's why Is Twitter broken? That's what many are asking today as their favorite apps for the social media service suddenly appeared to stop working. At roughly 0900 California time, people's lists of liked items, responses to specific search terms, mentions – in fact pretty much everything came to a sudden and unexpected halt. …
Suspect these are the reasons as I don't recall getting many or any ads on TweetDeck; I'm buggered if I'm going to use a broswer when an app on my Macbook works just fine. Having said that, although this is my primary social media platform, Facebook is just there for seeing what friends are up to and hobbies (Geocaching).
I'm not willing to pay as much as £108 pa + x to use another provider on my phone so I suppose between a level that high I'll just use the native app and select "I don't like this ad" every time it appears with increasing prevalence. What I do on my Macbook with no native app remains to be seen...
Well my ancient Tweetcaster application on Android is still working in terms of showing a timeline in reverse chronological order (although I guess the live streaming is dead now).
And that's what I want - a plain, reverse chronological ordered timeline of all my followed tweets. TBH I don't care if Twitter put ads in that timeline, just that it's in order, and where I got to is maintained, so I can dip in and catch up a little whilst on the toilet or in the pub waiting.
Also the font has to be small, and it's got to be light on dark theme.
I'm lost! Why are so many smart devs out there willing to bet their destiny plumbing to mercurial services like Twitter / Facebook that can dump you a heart beat, break what was working yesterday or up fees / change T&C faster then anyone can sneeze???
Who likes that kind of unpredictability / volatility. Aren't most software devs risk averse?! Trading cryptocoin seems more stable / wiser income. Plus, in the event of the Zombie apocalypse / WWIII, all this interconnected cesspit will break quickly!
And how about half a billion users ? Do you think it is that easy to put up a service and get that many users for a pittance ?
Well it isn't. Which is why developers are hitching a ride on a service that has them and is pretending to be open.
Well the pretend is over now, and Twitter is ham-fisting its way into money, or at least trying.
So the real question appears to be : when are people going to finally understand that anything that is "free" will only be so until it has become indispensible to a great many millions, then the penny will drop and charges will start.
Twitter has finally reached the tipping point where it visibly believes it can start reaping the benefits of its many users. We'll see if that is true, or if Twitter croaks and disappears into the Pond Of Irrelevance, where many others have already gone to drown and be forgotten.
Facebook is different, because it has succeeded in monetizing its users, whereas Twitter has obviously failed to do so. On the other hand, there's not much you can get out of 140 characters of drivel, so it's not surprising (yes, I know that it is more now, but in volume that was what Twitter could work with for a long time).
"believes it can start reaping the benefits "
maybe twitter is now at the point of make or break.
Would I pay for it? I don't know. I'm weaning myself off social media, partly because it can suck up too much time, partly because it's poisonous now.
PascaI Monett:
I have more than a few subscriptions which are spaced over the year, due to my limited finances, and none of them are cheap. Where problems exist: (1) They chose to dump it on the developers to do the collection, something most (including myself) simply can't provision. (2) Every effort they have done to date in applications, or Hell just the website(!), should never have seen the light of day. (3) Quit fucking with the API's!
That's a starter. There's more.
On the other hand, there's not much you can get out of 140 characters of drivel, so it's not surprising...
Twitter has always struck me as having potential for sentiment analysis. Response to campaigns whether they be political or advertising. What music people are listening to etc etc. I believe there are a number of apps that perform these tasks and are likely getting reamed right now by the price hikes.
Anecdotally I know why developers entertain these services. I know someone who created a sentiment based music thingy (didn't really bother finding out what it did) that leveraged off of tweets. Made him a multi millionaire when he sold it so I guess he's happy. It's basically a low odds unicorn play. If you're the unicorn you get really quite rich else you're just another keyboard monkey.
Twitter is the one social media that I use constantly. Facebook became irrelevant years ago for anything beyond family news, and Google+.... Well, you get the point.
Still, I can see the writing on the wall. The beauty of Twitter is the sheer simplicity of the platform, and a user base that can get the most out of it.
Sadly I expect that Twitter will jump headlong into a Facebookization, adding piles of crappy features in an effort to make money. Quality will decline and loyal users will walk away as soon as something better appears.
The crazy thing is that I would happily pay for Twitter as it is, and suspect that a large group of users would do the same. Surely all of us understand that "Free" is just an illusion, and that the user is often the product.
It's time for that to change.
>>Senior director "can't understand why people are using third parties and not Twitter's own apps"<<
Somebody please show him 'Hubris' in a dictionary, then point at the many examples where long running stable IT systems go to ratsh**t when the cost is hiked into the stratosphere.
Social media has no tie in except for the content, a couple of '{big name} is moving from Twitter to xyz' and the avalance will start.
Doesn't know why people prefer third-party apps to their native app? Has he used it often? I can think of at least three things that remind me why I don't bother any time I pull up the app.
1. Suchandsuch liked this tweet
2. Suggestions of people to follow
3. In case you missed it
I don't care who likes what. It is not what I am using the app for, it serves no purpose to me or anyone with a will of their own. I won't magically like it because someone I know does and more often than not if I did it would just be creepy.
I follow who I want to already. I don't need suggestions based on whatever flawed algorithm Twitter uses for this tripe.
In case I missed it? This is nearly as bad as the follower suggestions. I DO NOT CARE. If I missed it then I missed it. I won't suddenly panic and go rush to the Twitter feed to make sure I didn't miss more of their wonderful updates.
Oh, a late but relevant addition to all of these. "See less often" - how about a new option? "Don't show me this shit ever again." Additionally, why did Twitter move the "see less often" option to the bottom with "see more often" now at the top? I know why and it's very obvious. Most people would not look and just hit the first one because that was the old behaviour.
If anyone working at Twitter can't already see these very obvious issues with their official app I would suggest they see a proctologist to assist in removing their head from the darkness.
Why does Twitter exist? It showcases the absolute worst in humanity with very little real benefit. Its business model is straight out of South Park:
1. Give every clod a 144 (now 288!) character megaphone.
2. ???
3. Profit!
At what point to investors finally realize that there is no path to "monetization" and that they own a piece of the next MySpace? While other services are at least paying lip-service to addressing cyberbullying and propaganda distribution, Twitter is cautiously playing footsie. Why? Because most of the "problems" with Twitter are actually its features and are the reasons it is attractive for many people.
For once in my cursed life, I've made the 1%! Too bad it's the wrong 1%.
Does Twitter have enough insight and innovation internally to keep it moving forward while at the same time tackling its problems? We are seemingly about to find out.
I'm not sticking around to find out. Their ideas over the years have been terrible. Their interface totally broken when it comes to my work flows, which why I use third-party applications.
I wonder how Mastodon is getting along?
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What I want from Twitter is:
* Posts from the people I follow
* in the order they were posted.
No more, no less. Either ad-supported or maybe 20 bucks a year. 11 a month or more? Nope.
Twitteriffic does that well enough, so far. Twitter's official phone app is frankly unusable.
Oh, and fewer Nazis.
"Incredibly, app developers and Twitter have known about the situation for months but largely failed to let their users know"
Interesting, I have known this is coming for a long time, and the only place I would have found out is from the Dev. Twitter themselves on the other hand......
The Johnson mail is either the finest example of disingenuous corporate doublespeak I've read for a time Either that or he's completely out of his depth - and I'd argue that believing in the former implies the latter.
It also admits repeatedly (in corporate doublespeak) that they fucked up - the realisation of which appears to be dated the same as the end of the APIs - and yet there's no reprieve, while he goes and has a think what to do. Another indication that the message is just BS issued because he feels something needs to be said.
There's completely another way to get money from twitter users. Charge them a (reasonable) access fee on a per-user basis charged via the 3rd party client. I am absolutely sure that can be a lot more £/month than Twitter can make from advertising and whoring their user's data, and the users that don't want to pay can continue to use the official client - a route that FB et al have absolutely no access to. Perfect.
But it seems mindless head-in-the-sand corporate doublespeak is now in charge at Twitter, so that's unlikely.
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