The Original Twitter Trap

I’ve been setting up a blog for my wife recently and one of the functions I wanted for the blog was to post a tweet when she makes a new post.  Hardly breaking any new ground there! I ended up using the excellent WP to Twitter plugin by Joseph Dolson which expertly and extensively provides the functionality to enable this.  In the past configuring the plugin to your Twitter account would have been as simple as entering in your username and password.  But Twitter has disabled that old system sometime ago and have rolled out OAuth in it’s place.  Here’s what Joseph has to say about about the new method:

The process to set up OAuth authentication for your web site is needlessly laborious. It is also confusing. However, this is the only method available from Twitter at this time.

I certainly agree with his take on it!  It’s worth exploring some of the reasons behind this switch and how Twitter is attempting to lock down their platform and trap us by limiting our interactions to Twitter approved experiences.

The New Way

This is the setup form to connect your blog to Twitter if you’re using WP to Twitter.  It steps through quite a long and involved process where you have to register an ‘application’ on the Twitter developer site, ensure several key values are properly entered.  The output of this operation is not a single API key, but a series of four separate codes that you must enter in order for your blog to get access.

Why do this?

So what are the upsides to this arrangement from the user’s standpoint?  The largest, and indeed possible only, benefit the end user sees is that they do not have to give out their Twitter credentials to allow access.  It is all abstracted away by these tokens and keys which can be revoked on an application by application basis without changing the underlying credentials.

Certainly a noble cause and the one Twitter trumpeted the loudest when OAuth first came into being.  But, I have to ask, what are the benefits to Twitter for setting this up this way?

The primary benefit to Twitter is that this ensures that all applications can be managed and controlled by Twitter itself.  There is no working around the system.  Before an application and the actual user could be almost indistinguishable as far as Twitter was concerned.  Now there is a very clear and delineated separation between the two.  OAuth is a first stage in a power play by Twitter to take control of their platform back from the third-party developers who helped them get where they are.

API, Shmaypeeeye.

What’s phase two then?  Twitter recently let the other shoe drop and announced that they no longer want third-party developers to create Twitter clients.  These same developers who took Twitter from a quirky service that few understood and fewer used to the status update juggernaut it is today.  It really is an astounding betrayal by the company.  We would be seeing even more outcry from this but Twitter shrewdly grandfathered in the largest and most popular third-party Twitter clients so there wasn’t an immediate rush for the pitchforks and torches.

Okay, so that’s bad.  But does it really matter?  The most popular clients out there are the most popular for a reason after all.  They tend to be the best at what they do for their particular niche in the ecosystem.  I think it does matter and moving forward we’ll start to see possible changes coming from the Twitter side to get people off those third-party clients and back into Twitter controlled environments.

The Trap Closes, A Vision of a Possible Future

The dust is still settling now but Twitter isn’t going to long rest on its laurels.  I think what we’re going to see is that Twitter is going to stop developing the public API.  Keep in mind that this API provides the all mechanism for communicating with Twitter from these applications.  So, critically, if Twitter starts adding new features, new capabilities, new experiences and doesn’t update the public API to allow for their use, what then?

Then to get the “full” Twitter experience users will be forced onto Twitter approved clients.  In many ways this is Microsoft of the late 80s and 90s rearing it’s head again, Microsoft 2.0 if you will.  Hating Microsoft has become so passé it’s like having a deep abiding hatred for Atilla the Hun.  But they were feared and hated for very valid reasons for quite a long time.  What we’re seeing with Twitter is the rebirth of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except this time it’s wrapped up in Web 2.0 bow.

What Can Be Done?

In short, nothing really.  Twitter is well within their rights to allow, or not allow, access to their system however they please.  But Twitter isn’t the only system out there that provides the 140 character fix.  Other platforms like Identi.ca could conceivably fill the gap.  These other systems tend to be open-source and distributed meaning that the Twitter Trap simply couldn’t happen using them.

Without being too pessimistic I suspect that such services have a hard uphill battle ahead of them.  Twitter, like Microsoft in the 90s, has the ever-elusive quality known as mindshare.  Twitter is what everybody uses, Twitter is where you go to connect with everybody else, to follow interesting people, to see what new trends are bubbling up in our 21st century zeitgeist.

The thing with mindshare though is that it’s a slippery thing. And eventually the cookie will crumble and other options and other choices will begin to become more prominent.  Look at the rise of Firefox toppling IE 6 for a recent example.

For now I think we’ll have to wait and see.  If and when we see Twitter become evil then we can create our own Firefox and start the cycle anew.