Twitter Shuts Down JSON API and Names New CEO 104
An anonymous reader writes: This month Twitter is closing down the JSON endpoint API which thousands of third-party software and plugin developers have depended upon for years. The alternative Rest API offers data which is aggregated or limited in other ways, whilst the full-featured share data offered by Gnip (purchased last year by Twitter) can cost developers thousands per month to access — in one case up to £20,000 a month. The general objective seems to be to either drive users back to the core Twitter interface where they can be monetized via the social network's advertising, or to regain lost advertising by converting open source data — currently utilized a lot in scientific research — into premium information, offering the possibility for well-funded organizations to gain reputations as Twitter barometers without ever needing to expose the expensive, accurate share figures. The company also announced today that co-founder Jack Dorsey would be the new CEO.
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Twitter (Score:2)
Twitter: Foot. Gun. Aim gun at foot. FIRE!
AKA "ready, fire, aim"
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
It does indeed.
The worst thing that ever happened to Twitter was the retweet, just like the worst thing that ever happened to facebook was "share". Both of these things dramatically reduced the usability and usefulness of those sites. It changed the social media from a fun way to keep up with friends to an avalanche of nonsense you don't care about with a few nuggets buried somewhere inside.
This is the lifecycle for anything cool, I guess. Birth > Cool > Widespread adoption > Monetization > Bloat > Death spiral
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Funny)
It's kind of like bands.
School > Bars > Halls > Your mom has heard of them > Greatest Hits released > Stadiums > She likes them > Lamer than Lame Jock McLame.
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Somewhere in there near the end is producing a "Christmas Album", and used for background music at a shopping center.
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I thought it would include a late-night infomercial...
(In the old days, the name "K-Tel" would herald the bitter end.)
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Ronco fits in there somewhere. I don't remember exactly, and perhaps that's for the best.
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Ronco fits in there somewhere. I don't remember exactly, and perhaps that's for the best.
Don''t you dare insult my Popeil Pocket Fisherman!
Now I'm off to give myself a groovy new haircut with my Flowbee.
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It's funny to hear bands that were exceedingly controversial played as background music twenty years later. It shows one how quickly some changes can become acceptable.
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It's kind of like bands.
School > Bars > Halls > Your mom has heard of them > Greatest Hits released > Stadiums > She likes them > Lamer than Lame Jock McLame.
Not quite. After halls it's not "heard of them" but "your mom *hates* them" THEN stadiums, THEN "Greatest Hits". Everybody knows that a "greatest hits" album signifies the death of "cool" for the band ;-) - i.e. loss of "underground" status. After "Greatest hits" THEN it's "your mom likes them".. After which , really, instead of "lamer than whatever" it's "the $0.99 bins" - a MONTH after release !
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Depends on what you use Twitter for imo. If everyone retweets Uncle Charlie's ham sandwich that looks like Jesus then retweets are pretty worthless. But if it's for trading, retweeted news alerts are extremely valuable because you can catch a stock before it moves on the info.
In the bigger picture Twitter users are highly segmented. There's a huge difference between teens tweeting about relationships and professionals who have integrated the service into their daily lives. Following doctors and research
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*This doesn't count promoted tweets. Once, I got a few tweets for a doctor across the country from me. I t
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Then again, aside from several like-minded feminists and political/cultural types, I mostly follow news outlets and journalists.
One of those... thanks for the warning.
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Not sure my spam filter can handle anymore "X updated their profile/status/job/etc...."
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Little known feature (for me, at least): you can disable retweets for specific users you follow. This single feature made it so I cou
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In Soviet Russia, man gays you!
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Vladdy baby, we know it's you.
Now in the name of all that's holy, put your goddam shirt on already.
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oh, you mean business that panders to marketing scum will be hurt.
crying a river over here for them, maybe I'll commit suicide over this travesty
or, maybe I'll chuck a marketer or two into the chicago river on my way to the train to cheer myself up, whatever
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Oh noes! How will I live without access to posts by people letting the world know that they just had a slice of pizza and then took a dump in 140 characters or less.
Yep, pretty fucking tragic. Oh wait, no it's not.
Twitter: The confetti of the Internet.
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you were doing fine until you mentioned the two exceptions. please, you're still wasting part of your life and have room for improvement
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I follow about 50 people/groups/companies across the VMware world.
I've learned as much about new things there as I have anywhere else.
Sorry you don't see that as a reason to be on twitter.
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I've learned as much about new things there as I have anywhere else.
Holy shit....I just felt a disturbance in the Force...it's like 10 million teachers all cried out in agony and then quit their jobs.
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LOL. How many teachers are teaching new stuff about VMware?
You know. Stuff developed/created in the last month or two?
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How do you find a link in google if you don't know what you're searching for? i.e. new information.
Sorry a discovery tool works better for me than you, but get your head out of your ass.
Gnip? (Score:2)
Where's Gnop?
Yeah... I'm old.
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Similar vein. Gnop was Pong clone, Gnip is just Ping backwards.
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Indeed. There was an old game from the 70s that was called, "GNIP GNOP". Obviously, they were playing on "Ping Pong". heh
https://boardgamegeek.com/boar... [boardgamegeek.com]
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I started jumping up and down and landed on it. Dad glued it back together but it was never the same.
If you were female I would think I'd just found my soulmate.
I managed to step on mine within 2 minutes of opening the box. Crunch. The End.
I got over it, but still....
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HA! Extra funny that both of you managed to break your game immediately after opening them. :-)
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HA! Extra funny that both of you managed to break your game immediately after opening them. :-)
They sold millions of them, so our little club is probably larger than we realize. There might be hundreds of us clumsy-footed fools out there. lol
Twits. (Score:1)
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Re:The fact none of you care says more about (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL ... yeah, whatever.
Twitter's target demographic is people who believe their tweets are actually of any value.
I'm betting an absolutely huge majority of traffic on Twitter is completely pointless and inane ... "I'm going to the bathroom", "the poop is coming out", "meeting Bill and Larry for drinks". That's not "people with a life", that's inane and pointless drivel.
Questioning the value of this isn't about dottering neckbeards, it's about if the platform has much in the way of any real value for most of what it is used for, and also makes us ask "WTF is Twitter valued in the billions for again".
So, maybe all that's really happening is an overvalued company is looking to monetize and leverage synergies, and people who have created products around selling this stuff are getting burned ... the rest of it? Well, I suspect it's at least 22% crap about what those moronic Kardashians are doing now.
"People who have lives" my lily white ass. People who think tweeting means you have a life have no clue.
Re:The fact none of you care says more about (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm betting an absolutely huge majority of traffic on Twitter is completely pointless and inane ... "I'm going to the bathroom", "the poop is coming out", "meeting Bill and Larry for drinks".
This uninformed stereotype of twitter activity is outdated.
The vast majority of tweets today are links and retweets. Live example, I just looked at the 10 most recent tweets in my stream. The first 9 are links and the 10th is a comment about WeChat.
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I'm betting an absolutely huge majority of traffic on Twitter is completely pointless and inane ... "I'm going to the bathroom", "the poop is coming out", "meeting Bill and Larry for drinks".
Agreed. Shit like, "Just had the most AMAZING burrito!"
Yeah, like I care about their burrito.
Twitter- Promoting the ADHD Generation Since ummm Whenever"
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You're aware you have no obligation to follow morons, are you?
I don't have a twitter account, so I couldn't follow morons even if I wanted to. :)
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I'm betting an absolutely huge majority of traffic on Twitter is completely pointless and inane ... "I'm going to the bathroom", "the poop is coming out", "meeting Bill and Larry for drinks". That's not "people with a life", that's inane and pointless drivel.
I think you forgot #bm #whatarelief
People trying to make sentences out of hashtags has to end.
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"'I'm going to the bathroom', 'the poop is coming out', 'meeting Bill and Larry for drinks'. That's not 'people with a life', that's inane and pointless drivel."
I dunno, it sounds like those folks are enjoying healthy bowel movements and meeting their friends for drinks while you are bitching about a social network on Slashdot. You might be a bit quick to cast the "not people with a life" stone.
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IIUC, traffic on twitter has been used to measure the spread of epidemics, so it's not totally worthless.
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Much like Slashdot's target demographic is people who believe their posts are actually of any value.
You can say that about any form of communication. "Speaking is for people who think their words have value". Obvious point is obvious. And 90% of everything is crap, Twitter reflects that. So do Slashdot posts.
You can moderate what Slashdot posts you see by changing the score threshold. And you can moderate your Twi
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your irrelevance than it does about twitter. People with a life, not dottering neckbeards, are twitter's target demographic.
You mean people who only have life if that life is validated by someone else.
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(Kerry) even as he is jetting off for the TPP signing that is 100% guaranteed to remove whatever trivial impediments remain to frictionless off-shoring the last of our manufacturing base to whatever seething pollution hell-hole is cheapest this week.
The interesting part is that I was reading an article the other day about companies who are planning to save money by building automated factories in the West, so they no longer have to ship stuff thousands of miles from China.
International trade is about to collapse. But, then, you can't really expect politicians to be anything but twenty years behind the times.
Of course, the 'social media' bubble is about to collapse too.
Ob (Score:2)
Maybe they should have tried it the other way round.
Re:Ob (Score:5, Funny)
Shut down the CEO and name a new JSON API?
Dunno - seems like the latter happens every time Oracle coughs up a new version of JRE... can't argue with the former, though.
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Well, bye (Score:2)
Almost never used it, and they're about to learn a hard, hard lesson.
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Almost never used it, and they're about to learn a hard, hard lesson.
Agreed.....and agreed.
Twitter Dev #1: "Hey guys, how can we fuck shit up today?"
Twitter Dev #2: What if we shut some shit down without almost no warning?"
Twitter Dev #1: "Awesome!"
Twitter Dev #2: "Party ON, dude!" (guitar riff plays)
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I'm sure the devs had precisely dick to do with it.
Money, people. Follow the money.
Prior CEO was ejected for failing to monetize the platform.
New CEO brought on board with explicit directions to monetize the platform, or else.
Free data tap turned off. Only watering holes left are poorer quality, with promises of premium watering holes for premium prices later.
Mission Accomplished. Cash cow now being fully milked. And the millions of cows will go for it.
It was never about the geeks, and if geeks could do coo
At this rate (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well. Not ALWAYS.
I kid.
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I'm not sure what you're going on about.
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He *IS* an extremist. That doesn't mean he isn't right about some of the things he says.
Only saw "Twitter Shuts Down" (Score:1)
For a moment there I only saw "Twitter Shuts Down"
Got my damn hopes up there for a second. :P
Won't SOMEBODY Please Think Of The Scientists? (Score:2)
(moralistic tirade forthcoming)
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Honestly, it amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of Twitter data happens to orbit our networks, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same interface accessible to us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that
Note from twitter (Score:2)
"Hey devs...fuck you ha ha ha ha ha!"
-Signed, Twitter
Personally this is one of those "...and nothing of value was lost" moments.
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"Hey advertisers...fuck you ha ha ha ha ha!"
-Signed, Twitter
Personally this is one of those "...and nothing of value was lost" moments.
Fixed that for everyone :-)
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Press X to JSON.
So what (Score:2)
So a social media site that everyone thinks they are 'entitled' to is monetizing the service to pay the bills. If everyone jumps ship, then it fails, so what. I'm waiting for all social media like this to fade into obscurity like the pet rock.
Here's the real background (Score:1)
We've blogged about the infrastructure change that led to this decision https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hard-decisions-for-a-sustainable-platform - I'd also point out that as undocumented and unsupported endpoint, probably never a good idea to rely on this data. No plans to change other JSON endpoints on the API.
Disclaimer: I work as a Developer Advocate at Twitter