INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
As Twitter develops an ever-closer hold on how it manages services around its real-time news and social networking service, a pioneer in
Twitter analytics is calling it quits
Favstar, an early leader in developing a way to track and review how your and other people Tweets were getting liked and retweeted by others
on the network, has announced that it will be shutting down on June 19 — a direct result, its creator Tim Haines notes, of changes that
Twitter will be making to its own APIs, specifically around its Account Activity API, which is coming online at the same time that another
API, User Streams, is being depreciated.
Favstar and others rely on User Streams to power its services
&Twitter… [has] not been forthcoming with the details or pricing,& Favstar creator Tim Haines said of the newer API
&Favstar can&t continue to operate in this environment of uncertainty.&
Favstar announcement was made over the weekend, but the issue for it
and other developers has actually been brewing for a year.
Twitter announced back in Decemberthat, as part of the launch of theAccount
Activity API(originally announced April 2017), it would be shutting down User Streams on June 19.
User Streams are what Favstar, and a
number of other apps such asTalon,Tweetbot,Tweetings, andTwitterrific(as pointed out in thisblog post signed by all four on &Apps of a
Introduced as the Twitter Streaming APIfor developers, the aim was to provide a way for developers to get continuous updates from a number
of Twitter accounts — needed for services that either provided alternative Twitter interfaces or a way of parsing the many Tweets on the
platform — in a way that did not slow the whole service down.
The newer Account Activity API provides a number of features to developers
to help facilitate tracking Twitter and using services like direct messaging for business purposes:
As you can see, some of the features
that the newer API covers are directly linked to functionality you get via Favstar
The crux of the problem, writes Haines, is that Twitter hadn&t given Favstar and other developers that had been working with User Streams
(and other depreciating functionality) answers about pricing and other details so that they could see if a retooling of their services would
(Twitter has provided a guide, it seems, but it doesn&t appear to address these points.)
The post on Apps of a Feather further spells out
the technical issues:
&The new Account Activity API is currently in beta testing,but third-party developers have not been given access and
time is running out,& the developers write
&With access we might be able to implement some push notifications, but they would be limited at the standard level to 35 Twitter accounts &
our products must deliver notifications to hundreds of thousands of customers
No pricing has been given for Enterprise level service with unlimited accounts & we have no idea if this will be an affordable option for us
and our users.&
One of the consequences is that &automatic refresh of your timeline just won&t work,& they continue
&There is no web server on your mobile device or desktop computer that Twitter can contact with updates
Since updating your timeline with other methods is rate-limited by Twitter, you will see delays in real-time updates during sporting events
and breaking news.&
Favstar has been around since 2009 — its name a tip of the hat to the original &like& on Twitter, which was a star,
Haines writes that at its peak, it had some 50 million users and was a &huge hit& with those who realised how the network could be leveraged
to build up audiences outside of Twitter — including comedians and celebrities, tech people, journalists, and so on
It also tinkered with its service over time, and added in a Pro tier, to make it more user-friendly.
Somewhat unusual for a popular app,
Favstar appears to have always been bootstrapped.
But there have been two trends at play for years now, one specific to Twitter and another
a more general shift in the wider industry of apps:
The first, regarding Twitter, is that the company has been sharpening its business focus
for years to find viable, diverse and recurring sources of revenue, while at the same time putting a tighter griparound how its platform is
This has led the company to significantly shift its relationship with developers and third parties
In some cases, it has ceased to support and work with third-party apps that it feels effectively overlap with features and functions that
Twitter offers directly.
In the case of Favstar, the service rose in prominence at a time when Twitter appeared to completely ignore the
MG once described the Favorite as &the unwanted step child feature of Twitter
Though it has been around since the early days of the service, they have never really done anything to promote its use.&
Fast forward to
today, and Twitter has not only revamped the feature replacing the star with a heart (I still prefer the star, for what it worth), but
Twitter uses those endorsements to help tune its algorithm, and populate your notifications tab, and to provide analytics to users on how
In other words, it doing quite a bit of what Favstar does.
And if you think of how Twitter has developed its own business model in recent
years, with a push for video and working with news organisations and other media brands, the same early users of Favstar as detailed by
Haines (celebs, news and other media organizations, etc.) are exactly the targets that Twitter has been trying to connect with, too.
The
other, more general, trend that this latest turn has teased out is the one that we&ve heard come up many times before
Building services dependent on another platform can be a precarious state of affairs for a developer
You never know when the platform owner might simply decide to pull the plug on you
Your success could lead to many users, business growth, and even an acquisition by the platform itself — but it could nearly as quickly
lead to your downfall if the platform views you as a threat, and decides to cut you off instead.
Interestingly, there could be some life
left in Favstar in another galaxy far, far away
We&ve reached out both to Haines and to Twitter for further comment and will update this post as and when we learn more.
