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.

Tweet Button Shows 0 Fix

Twitter has a fancy widget/button called the Tweet Button that allows your readers to click a button to tweet about your webpage. It includes a count of how many people have tweeted about your page, similar to Facebook’s “like” button.

If your tweet button count seems to be stuck at zero try adding the data-counturl field. Its value should be the URL of the page you want the button to count (most likely the same value as your data-url field). Your tweet button code should look something like this:

<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"> </script>
<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button"
data-url="http://friendorfollow.com"
data-via="FriendOrFollow"
data-counturl="http://friendorfollow.com"
data-text="Who are you following that's not following you back? Find out here:"
data-related="DustyReagan:Creator of Friend or Follow,Cesart:Designer of Friend or Follow"
data-count="horizontal">Tweet</a>

This example above is obviously for FriendOrFollow.com. Just swap out the details with your own site or page.

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.