Funny that you mentioned all those fly-by-night URL shorteners. I wrote one of those in a coding competition we held at one of my former employers. I don't remember what made it special (if anything), but it had to die a few years later when scammers found it out and started using it to hide the target domains they were using from email scanners or the time.
One of the other reasons Twitter put some limits on 3rd party apps was performance. With no restrictions on how much data apps could pull and how frequently they could pull it, it was not uncommon for the entire app to go down when lots of users were active. Remember the Fail Whale? Yes, Twitter used that as an excuse to take control back, but the problem really did exist. If Elon opens it back up, we shouldn't expect the anything goes environment of 10 years ago.
This is the perfect example of the opportunity that lies in front of Twitter. Imagine if they opened up their APIs for everything: live audio, video, picture storage. Then they offer a low cost (or no cost) limited access, after which developers would move into paid tiers similar to how Amazon does AWS pricing. Twitter can make money and start moving their core business over to protocol management and hosting (similar to AWS). Imagine Twitter as the AWS of social network communication. That has massive potential.
Funny that you mentioned all those fly-by-night URL shorteners. I wrote one of those in a coding competition we held at one of my former employers. I don't remember what made it special (if anything), but it had to die a few years later when scammers found it out and started using it to hide the target domains they were using from email scanners or the time.
One of the other reasons Twitter put some limits on 3rd party apps was performance. With no restrictions on how much data apps could pull and how frequently they could pull it, it was not uncommon for the entire app to go down when lots of users were active. Remember the Fail Whale? Yes, Twitter used that as an excuse to take control back, but the problem really did exist. If Elon opens it back up, we shouldn't expect the anything goes environment of 10 years ago.
This is the perfect example of the opportunity that lies in front of Twitter. Imagine if they opened up their APIs for everything: live audio, video, picture storage. Then they offer a low cost (or no cost) limited access, after which developers would move into paid tiers similar to how Amazon does AWS pricing. Twitter can make money and start moving their core business over to protocol management and hosting (similar to AWS). Imagine Twitter as the AWS of social network communication. That has massive potential.