Friday, June 21st, 2013, 12:30 am
Twitter’s Suicide Plan: Blocking Everything, Again
Twitter is going down the drain and it has itself to blame
MAGINE a company stupid enough to follow the trajectory of MySpace and the now-deceased Digg.com
by its very own choice. Enter Twitter.
Twitter was a rapidly-growing site back in the days. It was getting links everywhere, just like Digg had gotten a lot of buttons and links. But then came the OAuth ‘revolution’ and Twitter shot many applications (digital vehicles that brought it traffic) right at the head. It wasn’t an accident. Twitter ended up breaking hooks and denying access by some applications that I was using until 2010, e.g. in IRC. What a colossal mistake. Twitter never quite recovered since then. Au contraire — the site has been declining little by little, especially in recent months. Rather than encourage developers to get involved, Twitter is doing it again — dampening third-party contributions — this time even more aggressively than before.
The news sites took little note of what Twitter had done. Twitter’s API idiocy not only broke crucial parts in 3 Web sites of mine but also in some clients’ sites. Thanks for the trouble, Twitter. You break things and leave us all to collect the pieces.
Twitter is making irrational decisions like killing off RSS, third-party developers, off-site links, etc. Are they on a suicide plan?
Twitter’s own widget, which is apparently what Twitter is trying to promote, is not even valid (X)HTML, so they’re encouraging people to put broken code inside their Web pages while blocking the competition.
Twitter’s future, I would guess, is similar to that of MySpace and Digg.com
. The US Library of Congress is saving all the contents, so one day when Twitter.com
goes offline we might still remember that old site which committed suicide, taking down with it all of our data, more or less like identi.ca.
June 21st, 2013 at 1:04 am
Hey Schestowitz
Yep, a major pain. Twitter’s API change broke lots of plugins for lots of web software including WordPress. I can’t make sense of such a decision.
Cheers
June 21st, 2013 at 7:53 am
I guess they didn’t think this through and yes, WordPress is affected also. To quote what I wrote to a client: