UPDATED WITH HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION
“Give me an API or give me death.”
—Patrick Henry, in defense of developers everywhere
—Patrick Henry, in defense of developers everywhere
Last month a developer named Dalton Caldwell announced what he described as “an audacious proposal”: an ad-free Twitter.
Outside of the tech industry fish bowl, Caldwell’sproposal didn’t get much attention. Twitter ads aren’t number one on most people’s list of gripes.
But inside Silicon Valley, Caldwell’s proposal was recognized as a Rosa Park’s style manifesto. Developers resent being held in thrall by advertisers. They are sick of ad-supported business models that require them to put the interests of advertisers above all else. And they are tired of being betrayed by so-called open platforms that suddenly change their terms of use and blithely destroy young and growing businesses.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. That sucks,” Jeff Hammerbacher, a former manager of the Facebookdata team and founder of Cloudera, famously said.
Members of Hacker News recently asked Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a celebrated start-up incubator, if he would reconsider his support of Twitter.
The incubator publishes “Requests for Startups,” similar to the business world’s Requests for Proposals, that describe the types of startups they’d like to fund.
RFS3 is “Things Built On Twitter.” Twitter is important, it states, because it’s a new messaging protocol. “Successful new protocols are rare. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. Each one of those protocols has spawned many successful companies. Twitter will too.”
On Friday, Steve Graham, a widely respected developer from the United Kingdom opened a discussion on the incubator’s must-read online bulletin board. “Given Twitter’s capricious enforcement of its API Rules of the Road, their willingness to allegedly crib features from apps in their ecosystem, and increasingly misaligned incentives vis-a-vis 3rd party developers and users, how long is it before this RFS becomes inordinately risky for YC to specifically solicit?”
“It certainly doesn’t seem as promising a territory as it used to,” Graham responded. “Not so much because it’s more dangerous as because Twitter hasn’t turned out to be a ‘platform’ in the same sense as say iOS has.”
Call it the battle of the business models. Instead of ads, developers want APIs.
APIs are connections, written in software code, that let one developer harness the power of what another developer has created. For example, a telephony API gives you the power of the phone network without the need to purchase expensive hardware, a mapping API makes it possible for you to build customized, dynamic maps without signing contracts with data providers, and a payments API lets you accept payments without having to worry about complying with complex financial regulations, etc.
APIs can form the basis of business model, as in the case of Stripe, a payments API, or they can be a revenue stream (for example, the Google Maps API).
“You are seeing a lot of real business and companies growing based on APIs,”says Oren Michaels, co-founder and CEO of Mashery, which provides API strategy services and developer outreach.
According to Caldwell, a self-described Twitter groupie, there was a point when Twitter considered building a business around its real-time API, but instead opted to focus on advertising.
Still, for years, Twitter continued to promote its API—as much as 23% of the content on Twitter comes from third-party clients.
But recently, Twitter has been restricting access to its service. Instagram’s users can no longer use the API to find their friends. LinkedIn users can’t push publish their tweets as LinkedIn updates.
A larger crackdown is widely expected, especially of apps like Flipboard, a social magazine, that curates articles based on what is being shared with you in your Twitter feed and other social channels. The reason is that such apps provide great opportunities for advertising, which Twitter needs to justify a an$8 billion plus valuation.
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