Twitteration Chapter 6 Verse 1-2: The Developers Flee

“Then I watched while the EV broke open the first of the seven API’s, and I heard one of the four living developers cry out in a voice like thunder, “No More.”

Twitter developers are feed up and jumping ship, according to a report from Jess Stay.

Stay points to Twitter developer forums where unhappy developers are saying that they’ve had enough. The best quote from one developer:

“Sorry, but I have to agree with the original author, it is a shame that the service and the API are so unreliable. The potential for the services that could be built on an API like the one offered by twitter are endless. They really are.

Statements like this: “my our metrics, it’s been pretty solid over the last few days” don’t do much to boost my confidence. When you make an API available, you are essentially saying to the world, “here’s our service, come and build something great on top of it.” You can’t build anything of any real value or widespread use on something that “has been *pretty solid* over the last couple days .” You just can’t. You need something that is rock solid all the time.”

Read the rest on Jesse’s blog. My only contribution: I hadn’t been logged into Twhirl for more than 2 minutes tonight before I got the message “limited exceeded, paused 5 minutes” despite having the latest version, a low API setting, and the new version of Twhirl allegedly offering auto throttling. Indeed this has been my default view for the majority of the time over the last two days. Every day I can’t get on Twitter it dies just that little bit more for me, as I know it is for others I speak to as well. On the road today I turned to Plurk for mobile updates because I knew Plurk would be working and the audience would be there to listen and engage. Once upon a time it was Twitter and nothing else. It’s just sad really.