The Free Twitter API Ends and The Twitter Silo Begins

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Social networks and social networks are based on people connecting with other people. Twitter is a glorified chatroom masquerading as a microblogging platform. As twitter shifts from being free, to being paying, it is losing it’s appeal.

Fifteen years ago there was plenty of discussion about Social Media silos and the social graph, and discussion about ROI for businesses, PR firms and personalities. They always forgot about the user. They exploit the user because the user, in their eyes, is an addict. This attitude make it okay to exploit social media users, in their eyes.

Screen capture of twitter dev account tweets about paying API

I am not worried about losing bots. Bots make a lot of noise, but don’t help Twitter, as a social network. What bothers me is the phrase “Twitter data are among the world’s most powerful data sets.” Facebook said the same thing, and then we read about Cambridge Analytica, emotion experiments, phone draining potential and more. We also read from books like Mindf*ck that Facebook was used to manipulate people to vote one way rather than the other. We learned that FaceBook could not be trusted with our data.

Now Twitter is using the same phrases. As I see the changes made by Musk I see that Twitter is becoming a silo, like FaceBook and Instagram. Twitter is no longer a social network. Twitter is a data farm where we are expected to pay, for content to be pushed on us, rather than seeing organic tweets, and where our data is mined by untrustworthy groups.

Through his actions Musk is turning Twitter into a data silo that I no longer want to be a part of.

Techcrunch addresses the topic from the reverse angle. “Twitter’s new announcement might impact research in different areas, including hate speech and online abuse.” On the one hand Twitter is making it harder to police what content is posted whilst encouraging others, with deep pockets to exploit that data.

TechDirt thinks that this move will encourage developers to move towards Mastodon but Mastodon is just one of many alternative websites. I would go further. By blocking access to the API twitter is encouraging people to lose trust in the company. First it blocks the apps people used to post and read tweets, then it blocked the API for bots, and tools for checking account related information, for example “map my followers” and other functionality. With the decline of those tools such actions will need to be manual.

The Washington Times phrased it as “Twitter shutting down free access to its public data”. Twitter should have become Not For Profit. It should have been made sustainable, whilst allowing people to converse globally. It is now sliding in the opposite direction, to become a silo, for people who want to exploit the data to manipulate people, rather than help spread news, information, friendships and conversations. Twitter, by moving towards becoming a silo, is removing the features that made it the strong, vibrant community that it was.

The Instagram API

I posted over 4000 images to Instagram over the years, until FaceBook bought and then destroyed the app. I used to post every single day, until I found that the app felt more and more lonely, and more and more of a waste of time. It had switched from being a social network to being an influencer network, where loneliness was the cost.

I tried to play with the API, to use Instagram externally but because of the blocks in place I couldn’t access my own data, without first proving that I should have access to it. That is what encouraged me to spend a few days trying to import the Instagram JSON file to WordPress. It worked, and I was happy. I had found a workflow to recover my data, and use it for my own website, rather than to provide content for a platform that did not respect me as a user.

Twitter is now doing the same. If we can’t access the API to use twitter as we want, then it does encourage us to move along, to the new alternatives, or, as I am doing, to write blog posts every day. This is day eighty of writing a blog post every single day.

If it wasn’t for the community I would have dumped Twitter years ago.

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Twitter and Breaking news

Byrichard

Once more twitter has shown it’s value. An earthquake occured earlier this morning and people started to twitter about it within half an hour. people like Robert Scoble started linking to the story. It took at least an hour for most of the major networks to start speaking about this news.

There’s a lag of course, as journalists have to do some research, get some reports and distribute them. I did a search on the twitter search engine flaptor and here is a little taste of the content of those tweets.

Here is another source of tweets.

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Twitter – Forget individuals, follow their community instead

Byrichard

For you to understand what people are talking about on twitter there is one thing you should know. When you follow Dacort, Loudmouthman, loic Lemeur, Jeff Pulver or many other people including me you’ve got to follow those that they are talking to as well as those that are listening. By this I mean that twitter is not about individuals so much as community.

If I spend the morning speaking to the English community then there are many names that will appear again and again. In so doin you’re going to be curious to see who’s on the other end. As a result of this you may decide to follow one person, then another and it continues. Over a period of days you may start following a dozen or more, people, maybe even hundreds.

As two people follow two others so the six degrees of seperation comes into force. I have links into the London, Geneva and Paris community for example (in terms of face to face meetings) and many more people via online conversations. What this means is simple. If you follow the right core f people you’ve got easy access to some influential people. In fact you may be one of them without realising it.

If twitter is simply about what you’re up to then that’s quite a restricted way of using twitter. To get the most out of twitter you have to find a good community and add it’s members. In so doing you can participate in some really interesting conversations. I’m within the social media conversation at the moment but over time as more groups participate so the conversation should be tailored to your needs. If you see someone @ another member see whether you can add that person too. Twitter is about the community, not individuals.

The Social Media Autumn

Byrichard

Liz Strauss wrote about the leaves and the trees and that got me thinking of the Social Media autumn. It’s the time of the year when everyone gets back to work after summer and they no longer have as much time to be sociable, whether online or offline and as the trees remains so the leaves are gone.

Of course in this context the trees are the social networks and the leaves are the users. How many of these trees are deserted? Kosso was wondering whether people will keep using phreadz in the same way. Loic Lemeur was questioning how people would keep using Seesmic. At the same time we’re going into what will probably turn out to be a recession and we get repetitive news.

One of those stories is about how Yahoo is getting rid of ten percent of it’s work force. That’s hardly new. They’ve had a few purges recently. That’s what you get for being one of the top three companies in search (or has it changed since then?).

One person recently wrote that the advantage of the recession is that it gives you an opportunity to get rid of those that are not as productive as they should be. It’s an opportunity to streamline the company and find new ways of being more productive. You see that’s the advantage of silence, of time apart, of a little time to think.

It’s the time when those in the social media, but it applies everywhere. How long will the recession last. Which networks will remain and who will stay. Why will they stay and what collaborations will thrive. Now is the time to see which ideas have the most potential. How will the social media look covered in snow?

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38 tweets an hour

Byrichard

Yesterday I decided that I would track how many tweets I receive within a 24hr period. The result is not that bad. Over that period 917 tweets transited through my timeline. These tweets are sent according to the time of day. Some of them are sent during the Australian morning, European morning and goodnight time for America. As a result there should be some visible peaks at certain times of day.

It’s an average of 38 tweets an hour, not to bad when you consider that reading a hundred and fourty characters takes only a second or two to scan over. Out of those tweets the vast majority are in English although I get Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch and Swedish to name those I remember off the top of my head.

The topic of these tweets is quite diverse from people’s project progress to websites they enjoy as well as to their daily lives. It’s an interesting aperçu of what all these social (new) media people are doing. Many friendships are built up as a result of this social network. It’s still interesting and I look forward to getting a higher average than a measly 38 messages an hour. Add me on twitter and I’ll follow you too.

Twitter hoped for the best, fell down as a result.

Byrichard
[caption id="attachment_826" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="Reason for twitter downtime"]Reason for twitter downtime[/caption]

Yet again twitter hoped for the best and as a result went down for several hours. It’s a simple illustration of why I remain critical of the way twitter is run. What I love best is the “It’s a problem we knew about…”

The Social Media Reflex
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The Social Media Reflex

Byrichard

This morning I uninstalled Facebook and Twitter because most of the tweets I saw were people complaining about things or posts that would fit perfectly as blog posts on a website. We have moved towards the Social Media reflex, rather than towards an open sharing habit.



Before social media, we would have conversations on web forums and within comments on websites. As social media centralised all of those conversations so the engagement between people declined. With that decline of conversations so we shift towards two things. The first of these is complaining, rather than engaging. When you complain there is no expectation of a response so the personal investment is low. Add to this that algorithms are designed to promote posts that have a lot of engagement and you have a perfect storm of pessimism.


That pessimism has no positive outcome and it is for this reason that I removed the two apps from my phone. Twitter and Facebook will probably make their way back on to my phone within days or weeks but I’d like to resist and see what change occurs.


I have kept Instagram and Whatsapp. Both of these apps, although part of FB help us keep connected with people we still see in the physical world. I also love to walk around and take pictures to share to Instagram before reusing the same images for blog posts once I have time to write a proper blog post.


We need to take back the time we invested on Social media, and reuse it for productive pursuits as we did before Twitter and Facebook post-2007. Twitter and Facebook were productive when they were just websites, rather than profitable.


Blogging, as a challenge


I like to see blogging as a daily challenge. The challenge is to find inspiration to write at least three hundred words on a topic every day when possible, and after every adventure when not possible. We improve our writing and creative skills. We go from a blank page to remembering what we did, as well as developing our ideas from 140 characters to three hundred or more words. The result is something that others can read. When it’s about hiking, Via Ferrata, climbing, travel or other topics it may even inspire them to follow and try the same thing.


Another part of this challenge is to write half a paragraph or two and run out of inspiration, think for a few minutes, walk around, put some batteries to charge and then coming back with more. Whereas a tweet or facebook post is a single thought shared within seconds a blog post is a cohesive collection of thoughts that join together to form a blog post. Every blog post is an intellectual journey.


Sustained positivity


Aside from finding inspiration for blog posts another challenge is to try to keep them either positive or neutral. If you write a negative blog post you are not anonymous and it is sustained for a few paragraphs. If you write a positive blog post and sustain that for a few paragraphs. The reader and the writer have gained something.


Something Worth sharing


Blogging is about creating something that is worth sharing. It isn’t about filling time like Facebook or Twitter. It is about thought, inspiration and experiences. It’s about having something positive to share. Whereas some people want to write a thread I do more than that. I leave the stream of constant interruptions and I focus on just one thing, until it’s done, or I run out of inspiration. I wish that the same people who write twitter threads would write blog posts instead.


To write a blog post is to invest your time in an activity that may get no response, or if it does get a response it maybe years later. This doesn’t matter. We read entire books without leaving a response for the writer, except the money we spent to buy the book. Social media has tricked people into believing that without a response, whether a like, a favourite, a comment, or a share they are being ignored. “I’m not writing a blog post because no one will read it, that’s why I write a thread of tweets”.


The time that you spend writing a blog post is the time that you have invested in a finished product. There has been less “mindless scrolling”, fewer interruptions and best of all you have something tangible to show. “Yes, I did spend an hour writing this blog post, but I did something productive with my time”.


Compare that to this article in the Guardian. ;-). I haven’t uninstalled the apps because I’m worried about the time I spend on social media. I uninstalled the apps because the Return on Investment (ROI), as a user, is almost zero.

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