This is a situation where one developer had a special exception carved out for them for a non-commercial project that everyone thought was cool. That access persisted for three years until someone made a decision that giving free access to something that normally they charge quite a lot of money for is not worth it.

Twitter offers several free endpoints for developers, including search, streaming, a raw sample of tweets, and the like. They all have rate limits and the like attached, but they're real, free, access to their data.

For people who want bigger, broader, deeper access, they sell access to that data. That's been the case for the last few years.

In this case, Emojitracker unfortunately falls into the cracks in between, where they need deeper access to do what they want, but it's not a commercial enterprise.

I agree, it would be nice of Twitter to continue giving Emojitracker free access, but are they obligated to do that? They are a business, and providing access to millions of Tweets for free seems like an unfair obligation to ask them to continue indefinitely.

>That access persisted for three years until someone made a decision that giving free access to something that normally they charge quite a lot of money for is not worth it.

Right. The point here is that the decision might be stupid. It's fodder for exactly this type of a story, while Twitter is pushing for improved relations with developers and trying determine its future as a going concern.

Of course they aren't obligated to do continue to provide free access, in the same sense that I'm not obligated to use their platform. But it might be in their best interest (in both cases).

For all the acclaim that Mr. Dorsey gets as a CEO, Twitter is a great idea but a basket case of a public company.

The comment you are replying did not say or imply Twitter was obligated to do anything.

But continuing to provide this noncommercial API access for free indefinitely is exactly what I think they should do and I'm a little disappointed that they don't agree. Twitter isn't wrong here, they're just assholes.

They do still have noncommercial API access for free (who knows for how long). What is going away is this individual's special access.

Right, I think the individual should continue to get special access forever. It's a terrible idea to cut off people doing something cool with your platform because of what? Saving the negligible cost of supporting their volume of API calls? A message to developers that rules are strictly enforced? Not exactly a PR win.

>Right, I think the individual should continue to get special access forever. It's a terrible idea to cut off people doing something cool with your platform because of what?

Because "special access" means free in this case.

Do you realize you are arguing that a customer should have free access forever, while others customers pay? Do you know what type of liability that is for any business?

There's nothing unusual about charging commercial users of a product while not charging non-commercial users. Academic and non-profit discounts, down to making your product free to them, are extremely commonplace. There's nothing unusual about sponsoring interesting projects, or making special arrangements when it's mutually beneficial. Giving a tiny customer free access forever, and getting a bunch of goodwill associated with their brand in return, is not a liability, it's good business.

There is something unusual with a contract for free access to a paid service that goes to perpetuity, no matter how many times you try to redefine it.

If it was the case that emojitracker was reselling that api access, I could see cutting it off.

But I think that a rich, robust ecosystem would flourish more around a platform that provided free API access to noncommercial projects.

Of course, it's conceivable that this API access costs twitter a significant amount of money - it is a lot of data, after all. Even a low cost could be written off as advertising within the platform. "Look at the cool stuff we could build on this API, let's make a commercial product and pay twitter for access!"

> But I think that a rich, robust ecosystem would flourish more around a platform that provided free API access to noncommercial projects.

This. Also, if API access costs Twitter a significant amount of money, they shouldn't be in the platform business and shut down their API entirely.

> They are a business, and providing access to millions of Tweets for free seems like an unfair obligation to ask them to continue indefinitely.

While not indefinitely, it would certainly help the case to just public a cost-benefit analysis of how much Emojitracker's access was costing Twitter (though not in terms of "lost revenue" based on what Emojitracker would have been paying for that access).

Who says they didn't perform the kind of cost/benefit analysis you mention and estimated that it wasn't worth the effort? And if that was their estimation, despite our (NH denizens) collective annoyance, maybe they were right. Maybe providing free access made prospective paying customers less likely to pay for firehose access, or a slew of not-for-profit organisations requesting free firehose access citing emojitracker as a precedent. There's a myriad of hypotheticals and whomever made this decision is not necessarily irrational... it just depends on what constitutes their utility function.

I was saying that maybe it would have been a good idea for them to publish that analysis publicly, or just to emojitracker (where they would presumably publish it for Twitter).

I don't see that as Twitter's obligation. When someone does you a favor, or makes an exception for you, it's nice if they give you a reason when they end it, but it's not their responsibility.

No, it's not their responsibility. I'm just saying that PR-wise it could have been a good move to just say, "Hey, it's costing us $X/month to give you an exception for this access. Sorry, but we can't justify that cost going forward." Are you saying that it would have been a bad move for them to say that?

> For people who want bigger, broader, deeper access, they sell access to that data. That's been the case for the last few years.

Can I pay $ 100 extra per month for more access?

It's very expensive. You have to be careful to only register high signal / low noise terms or risk a massive bill.

To get the data emojitracker has would be tens of thousands a month or more.

Most of it is based on volume - I have no idea what the entry point is for some of these things, but there are increments of data or access that are around that much.

But no, I doubt you can pony up $100/mo and get a meaningful amount of data.

That's the issue with Twitter and this is their fault. Google was revolutionary when they introduced a way to advertise (yes, AdWords) for only $ 5 while others (e.g: Yahoo) required thousand dollars as an entry point. I know it is not easy to develop/set up such system and deal with millions of retail customers but... in 2016? You can even do this with Twitter Advertising so I don't understand why they can't solve this for their API.

It feels to me like "kill platform dreams" is written on the other side of the coin that says "sustainable business model".

It is a serious challenge that the data has some value, but that value is hard to extract usefully as a revenue stream. The emojitracker folks won't pay much, but offering it to them at a small rate vs a high rate to some other service has its own issues.

But since emojii tracker isn't real time, could they use a month old firehose? 6 months old? At some point the value of the firehose access falls off for "mainstream" users of that data, does it fall to a point where there is marginal value in giving free access to others on it? Even for small dollars?

Clearly as a public company Twitter has to do what it can to get good value for the assets it has created. That is a hard thing to do.

At the risk of sounding pedantic: Twitter's assets were created by its users, not the company. They alienate the users, there are no more assets and no more value to be had.

I think we see it a bit differently. When the grocery store chain sells information about the buying habits of its customers, it is the customers doing the buying, but it was the collection and monitoring systems that "created" the information.

Twitter has "users" but those users are not the "customers". Twitter created a watering hole so that it could interest nearby predators in access to where the herbivores would be on hot days.

To be counter-pedantic (is that a word?) If there were anywhere else for Emojitracker to get their data, then I would agree with you that Twitter did not create it.

I think that watering hole analogy is the the best explanation of the online ad industry that I've heard in quite a while.

The problem I see with Twitter and the reason it stagnated and isn't making money, is they don't really understand their platform and users.

Flip that with Snapchat who 100% do know their users and converting them into customers.

What does converting users into customers mean for snapchat? What are they selling?

I'm pretty confused by that as well. Isn't Snapchat making their money off advertising primarily? I know they have plans to expand the kind of user data they track (including "browsing and searches beyond the app").

http://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/is-snapchat-on-t...

filters i suppose

Hmm, do YOU understand Twitter's platform and users? If you have some cool insights into those things then I'd love to hear them!

Well this is on the front-page now. maybe he will scream at the team and say "don't shut it down."

You mean like they shut down the Twitter share counter data right after Jack had a big conference once he came back as CEO promising better developer relations? So, I doubt they care about the state of developer relations, as a platform.

I don't think Jack gets his news from HN.

He may or may not, but I wouldn't doubt their PR team already pinned HN as a source to consume. Plus there is https://twitter.com/newsycombinator. #twitter, definitely.