If so: burn them with fire.
> "The @reply and Mention functions are intended to make communication between users easier, and automating these processes in order to reach many users is considered an abuse of the feature. If you are automatically sending @reply messages or Mentions to many users, the recipients must request or approve this action in advance. For example, sending automated @replies based on keyword searches is not permitted. Users should also have an easy way to opt-out of your service (in addition to the requirement that all users must opt-in before receiving the messages)"
Although this behavior is still in the app I believe. Regardless, this, along with the [LIVE NOW] spam, has resulted in me unfollowing/muting everyone who uses Meerkat on Twitter, which has significantly reduced the effectiveness of Twitter for me, and which is why I think Twitter is in the right for wanting to restrict content.
That's not 'automatically… to many users" but specifically to those viewing a thread, and only when individual users compose individual replies. It's not a clear violation of the quoted policy… if at all. And as you note, that's not the behavior Twitter has started.
I'm following a lot of people who've announced Meerkat streams, and I've watched a Meerkat stream via the web – but I've not received any unsolicited messages.
Nope, my twitter stream is buried with |LIVE NOW| tweets from people who are using Meerkat. I'm hoping that will stop now.
1) Say that you follow me on twitter.
2) You download and run meerkat
3) I download and run meerkat. At this point you get a push notification from meerkat indicating that I've done this.
4) I start streaming on meerkat. At this point you receive a push notification from meerkat indicating that I'm doing this.
At no time do I get anything about you (unless I'm also following you on twitter).
I don't think meerkat did anything user hostile. But they did do something that was hostile to twitter (given that twitter is apparently launching a competitor) so it's no shock that they are getting cut off from the social graph.
- Auto-follow @appmeerkat on twitter when you sign up
- Auto-enable push notifications for @appmeerkat's tweets when you sign up
- Auto-tweet when you schedule a stream
- Auto-tweet when you start streaming
- Auto-tweet when you comment on a stream
This is the entire disclosure they offered: "Everything that happens on Meerkat happens on Twitter"
Or did we remove the concept of decency from our business vocabularies already?
1. Web version - typical Facebook style, describes specific permissions but there are only 2 options that devs can use: read or read/write (plus read/write + direct messages but that will be gone this year)
2. iOS version - menu slides in with all of your system authorized twitter accounts, you tap the one you want
I'm pretty positive #2 does not give you any real authorization messages or screens. I just logged out of Meerkat to find out but that screen doesn't work anymore because their keys are broken
Now, I'm on the side of Twitter in this one, but I think it's an interesting thought experiment. To me the difference is that they ended up bothering Twitter's users (as seen by the comments on this thread), whereas Uber just bothered cab drivers, cab company owners and medallion holders - a relatively small audience that has pissed off a lot people.
There's also the issue of whether Twitter has a monopoly in the same sense that the cab companies do.
Also, the fact that Twitter can protect itself and cab drivers need the government to protect their rights goes against the libertarian ideology of HN's majority.
And don't forget that outside our bubble, Uber pissed off a lot of people that favor labor and and consumer protection and aren't big fans of American corporations hailing the return to early 20th century exploitation as "innovation".
In the above case, Twitter is a private company, and has a right to do whatever it wants with it's service. It can get away with as much as it's users will tolerate. As a public company it has shareholder requirements, sure, but in this case it was a technology/UX problem. Meerkat was doing something that most seem to think devalued peoples user experience, and abused the purposes of implemented features. Meerkat gained a lot of exposure, and I am sure some people did benefit by it, but by and large the beneficiary was Meerkat gaining exposure by broadcasting pre-made content (spamming).
Good. If "people I interact with twitter autospamming me every time they use an unrelated service" becomes A Thing then I might as well not use twitter.
He knew it was coming, he knew it was wrong. Why would he need more warning than two hours? Why even a warning?
Still waiting for the first attempt to test the legal waters on scraping Twitter.
Facebook, OTOH, has pretty much turned off access to the friends graph for apps other than games.
https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/friends/ids
This is probably the only fair endpoint that Twitter has in terms of rate limiting. Getting that scale of information via conventional scraping would be infeasable.
Can't argue it hasn't worked well for them with a lot of influential voice talking about the app.
Not to say it will succeed in the long run, but in this case they could have done a lot worse.
I've never seen companies that treats their API partners with as much disdain as those two companies.
(Remember that this was back before Gmail and often your email client did the bulk of spam detection, if not all .. though my memory is a little rusty)
Despite their poor grammar it should have been included here.
