Twitter has just introduced a few dramatic API changes.

dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api, dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms and dev.twitter.com/terms/display-guidelines

For those unfamiliar with the term, the API is the set of entry points that third-party applications use to integrate with Twitter. In other words, this is what you use when you want to offer an application that works with Twitter data or users.

These changes do not really bother us because we don’t integrate with Twitter but I thought I would illustrate how an API and its license requirements actually shape the way you do business with the corporation providing the API.

Display Guidelines will be Display Requirements

Mmh, the title says it all. What was just recommended is now mandatory.

No other social or 3rd party actions may be attached to a Tweet.

This means that if you display tweets on your site or app, Twitter is the only provider of actions on these tweets. You can’t provide custom actions, especially other ways of sharing a tweet.

Tweets that are grouped together into a timeline should not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other networks.

That’s the ice on the cake. Don’t interleave Twitter stuff with data coming from other sources.

Pretty much everything in the Display Guidelines turns the whole thing into a read-only show of Twitter.

Of course, Twitter has to protect its brand, but isn’t the whole built on top of YOUR data? To me it’s just one big reason to support alternatives like app.net/. The other conclusion of this mess is: do NOT build a company or a product on top of Twitter, you might regret it.

In his open letter to Mark Zuckerberg (daltoncaldwell.com/dear-mark-zuckerberg) tells his unfortunate encounter with the Facebook reality.

This reality is quite simple: Facebook (and other social networks such as Twitter or LinkedIn) do not care about the developers building apps on top of their platform. All they care about is their revenue stream and if you get in their way or if you have an idea that appeals to them, they’ll either copy it or try to acqui-hire you. They also made an habit of shutting down or restricting APIs as it pleases them based on who’s on the other side. In other words, they say: “use my API to do your miserable things but don’t you dare compete with me”.

In a way this is normal, they’re not here for the good of humanity, they’re here to do business and make money, just like us and everyone else. The trick is that to achieve this goal, they rely on you (the users) and us (the developers), which gives them some sort of responsibility not to act as recklessly as they do.

Whether you are an app developer or simply using their Oauth services to provide a unified login to your services, just be careful and think twice before putting your business model into their hands…

TechCrunch just had this interesting contest with the Founder Institute where they asked for startups to pitch their project in one sentence. The sentence had to be formulated using this patent-pending template:

My company, _(insert name of company)_, is developing _(a defined offering)_ to help _(a defined audience)_ _(solve a problem)_ with _(secret sauce)_”.

techcrunch.com/2012/04/21/one-sentence-pitch-founder-institute/
techcrunch.com/2012/04/24/one-sentence-pitch-winners/

It lead to pretty interesting pitches and I’ll let you judge the winners but most pitches were actually quite impossible to digest. For the fun of it, we tried to loosely make our own and it gave lines going from:

We make tablet apps for kids and teens to tell stories.

to:

We make tablet apps for kids and teens to author illustrated stories without drawing skills using 2D and 3D content provided with the app or purchased in-app.

It is obvious that if you’re not able to explain what you’re doing in simple terms, it’s not a going sign for the viability of your business. But what stroke me is that, although it’s good to use a template to describe what you’re doing, this is all too formatted. Just like when you write business plans or prepare accounting documents. How boring is it to have to fill the blanks!

The other day I was reading a blog post (sorry, I can’t remember which one) and the author said something like:

Martin Luther King didn’t say: “I had a vision statement”, he said: “I had a dream”.

and this represents well what I have in mind. Instead of this one-sentence pitch, I’d rather say:

Our dream is to turn kids into authors.

(What’s yours?)

Today was the billion dollar day… Microsoft bought 800 patents to AOL and Facebook acquired Instagram for that amount.

Which leads to that sad quote from @dkberman:

Remember this day. 551-day-old Instagram is worth $1 billion. 116-year-old New York Times Co.: $967 million.

Another very nice and relaxing blog I enjoy everyday is Maria Riazzoli’s “things I like, things I love”. So refreshing…

Great post by Mike Masnick on patent trolls and Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold’s (ex Microsoft CTO) operation.

Intellectual Ventures isn’t “changing the status quo.” It’s doing the opposite, it’s taking the “status quo” — a completely broken law that gets lawyers and investors rich but massively hinders actual innovation — and scaling it up to massively harmful proportions. Intellectual Ventures has done nothing to help drive innovation forward. It has only taken money out of the innovation economy. No one is threatened by inventors inventing new stuff.

It’s common sense that the patent system is doing to opposite of what it was meant for. There’s a funny one in the comments:

It’s just like how our exploding prison population shows our judicial system is running perfectly. It makes perfect sense!

Anyway, it’s a good thing that the European Parliament rejected computer (and software) patents in 2005.

The problem in the US is that, not only the administration that has acknowledged that they’re aware of the problem doesn’t do anything about it (I guess they have higher priority problems to cope with) but the companies that should be fighting it (Apple, Google, and the like) are now using it as weapons too.

In addition to our apps, these are the apps I use the most on my iPad and would recommend:

• AVPlayerHD: a good player for avi and divx videos.
• MobileRSS: a nice RSS reader that works great with your Google Reader feeds. You have to clear its cache manually from time to time and it crashes sometimes when I mark all entries as read, but I stick with it anyway.
• Keynote: no need to present it. You can use it for presentations or UI mockups.
• Twitterrific: great Twitter client.
• Deep Green: Chess. I wish I could win from time to time.

Other cool apps that I use when needed: iPhoto, Remote, Brushes, Bamboo Paper, iA Writer, Prompt, Wunderlist, Skype, Poly and the magnificent Dropbox.

cabin porn is a site I go to when I need relaxing. I think about what it would be to live there, with no Internet. Just an axe to cut some wood for the chimney.

The URL is pretty funny too.