Why isn’t Twitter charging for their API?

It feels like Twitter’s general attitude towards API developers has increasingly become one of annoyance. The reason the API has become such a pain to Twitter is because they’re just giving it away.

Why aren’t they charging tiered pricing based on required access? The API is already rate limited, they just need to adjust the rates based on the payment. Instead they’ve resold the Firehose via Gnip and DataShift, which they could be selling directly. And the rest of the API they’re resentfully giving away for free.

As a developer of the Twitter API, I don’t want to be resented, I want to be respected as a consumer of their product! Let me pay for access!

I’m talking $19, $99, $299, $999, $9999, “call us” style plans here. They could charge the whole developer market. Instead, they’re putting all their hopes in “Twitter stream advertising.” They have an extremely large potential revenue stream that they’re basically just giving away for free, and they’re giving off a vibe that they’re annoyed by the developers that use it.

Twitter MySQL User Object Table Schema

A common practice for Twitter application developers is creating a MySQL table to store user objects returned from Twitter’s API. I’m trying to optimize my user table for Friend Or Follow, and it occurred to me how many developers must be reinventing this MySQL table schema, so let’s get it right once and for all.

Here’s where I’m starting. If you see anything that I’m missing, or notice a data type that could be optimized let me know in the comments and I’ll update the post to reflect your suggestions.

Austin Tech Community Events Calendar Strategy

We have a lot of awesome tech and entrepreneurship communities in Austin: door64, Geek Austin, Social Media Club, Bootstrap Austin, Refresh Austin, Jelly, and Startup Drinks, just to name a few. Recently Austin has been doing really well intermingling and cross pollinating our communities, and that has got me EXTREMELY excited. Just the other day Social Media Club had their meeting during Austin Jelly, during that cross mingling Jelly got a few new coworkers and Social Media Club got some new member interest. How cool is that?

One large barrier I’ve found organizing Austin Jelly is the proliferation of calendars online for me to post my events to. And each of those calendars has their own small audience, so of course I need to post to all of them to reach the largest audience. What we need is ONE shared calendar feed with an API so we can display and post events from our organizations website. But the key thing is that the backend is shared, so we’re promoting each others events across the web.

Matt has done a great job developing the community and the calendar at door64.com. One great thing about the door64 calendar (aside from the amount of events posted there and the audience size) is that it’s already integrated into Google Calendars, which is a huge step towards making it easy to spread.

I’d like to help make the door64 calendar THE tech event calendar for Austin. I believe the way to this is by developing the following:

  1. Create WordPress Widget for Austin Tech Events
    (Are you an Austin Tech blogger? Why not promote Austin Tech events by using this widget? PS. It’s almost done, check it out on the bottom of my blog’s sidebar.)
  2. Create automated batch push of Austin events to 3rd party calendars via API
    (AKA: Post an event to door64.com and it gets pushed to these other event calendars.)

    1. Upcoming
    2. Craigslist
    3. What else?
  3. Create an event posting API
    (AKA: Post events to door64’s calendar from your organization’s website. Keep your brand, but cross promote your event.)

What do you think? I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts.