<story><title>Twitter shut down Emojitracker&apos;s access</title><url>https://medium.com/@mroth/u-1f647-person-bowing-deeply-5402c3ee5676#.z3df4bj6h</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kbenson</author><text>So?  If they want all these special access cases handled through Gnip, whether they are discounted or free, that&amp;#x27;s their call.  Just because it&amp;#x27;s through the commercial arm doesn&amp;#x27;t mean they would be incapable of handling special cases.&lt;p&gt;In any case, it&amp;#x27;s all speculation, there was never a dialogue, and the HN title as it current stands is probably inflaming this more than it should be.  Their access was not shut down (and the blog post&amp;#x27;s title and wording does does not say it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; shut down, but that they believe they &lt;i&gt;will be&lt;/i&gt; shut down).  An email was sent, it was poorly worded, and the recipient overreacted (or at least prematurely reacted).  The responsible thing to do would have been to contact Twitter or the sender and discuss the needs and goals of the project, and see what they could offer.&lt;p&gt;Immediately writing a public blog post is not negotiating in good faith.</text></item><item><author>dangrossman</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s referring to Gnip still. They offer several levels of access and historical search, in addition to the firehose stream, for money.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If they want all these special access cases handled through Gnip, whether they are discounted or free, that&amp;#x27;s their call.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s nothing in the mail suggesting they &amp;quot;want special access cases handled through Gnip&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>kbenson</author><text>&amp;gt; which provided no particular encouragement that there might be other terms available&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not entirely correct.  Under option 2 after mentioning it&amp;#x27;s commercial side, it says:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;There are also other solutions that offer varying levels of access as well as historical search.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not prominent (likely because they only want it pursued in special cases), and it&amp;#x27;s easy to miss, but it is there.</text></item><item><author>jrochkind1</author><text>So, the OP provided the email he recieved.&lt;p&gt;It did not ask him to clarify what he is doing, it did not say anything about bounds of acceptable use cases or what they might be, it did not encourage him to contact Twitter directly, or provide a link to do so. It did _not_ &amp;quot;inquire about why the developer needs elevated access&amp;quot;, there is no such inquiry in the email. It _did_ say elevated access was going away.&lt;p&gt;It said he could use the free API with rate limits, or the commercial Gnip API.&lt;p&gt;It kind of half-heartedly suggested he could &amp;quot;reply to this email&amp;quot; if he had &amp;quot;questions&amp;quot;.  From the email, there was no reason to think elevated access might still be available, it pretty clearly said it would _not_ be, so I&amp;#x27;m not surprised he didn&amp;#x27;t have any questions -- the email was quite clear (at saying something pretty different than you are saying).&lt;p&gt;So when you describe the email that goes out -- it does not seem to describe the one he received, according to him in the post. Are you talking about a different email? That he did not receive, or that you think he should have received in addition? Or do you actually think that email somehow communicates what you describe above? (It really really does not, which is why I think you must be thinking of a different email he did not receive or post, or you were internally misinformed about what the email was going to say).&lt;p&gt;With the email he actually pasted into the OP it is not surprising that he simply publicly notified his userbase and other interested parties that the service would be going away -- what else do you do when your upstream provider tells you the service is going away? This is all very standard and professional.&lt;p&gt;But, if you are saying that you do continue providing free elevated access to certain projects that seem worthwhile and meet some &amp;#x27;boudns of acceptable use&amp;#x27;, then that is nice, cool, I&amp;#x27;m glad Twitter is doing this.  (Maybe you should have told him that in the email though! And it would be great to actually advertise that fact, and what the bounds of acceptable use are, and how someone can get in touch with you to request access.)</text></item><item><author>CoolAssPuppy</author><text>Hi, I&amp;#x27;m Prashant. I run Developer Relations at Twitter. I want to clarify a few things here.&lt;p&gt;In the past, Twitter had little formality associated with granting elevated access. It was very much, &amp;quot;Hey, I want to do this cool thing!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Okay, sure, here you go.&amp;quot; As Twitter&amp;#x27;s platform business has matured to include many businesses building billions of dollars worth of social media monitoring and other tools, we&amp;#x27;ve formalized the process to becoming a Twitter Official Partner (partners.twitter.com). Over the last six months, we&amp;#x27;ve started contacting all of those API key holders with elevated access and asked them to clarify what they&amp;#x27;re doing. In some cases, we know the business and business owner and reach out personally. In other cases, like this one, the business is listed in our systems as &amp;quot;N&amp;#x2F;A&amp;quot;, so we send the template mail.&lt;p&gt;In the email, we encourage people who believe their app is within the bounds of acceptable use cases on Twitter to contact us directly, and provide a link to do so. The owner of this app elected to blog publicly about the situation before contacting us, which is unfortunate. We have contacted the owner of this app and hope to resolve this situation, as we do with hundreds of other developers on our platform. We do occasionally provide exceptions for apps that are non-commercial (not-for-profit, no ads, etc.)&lt;p&gt;Note also that in this instance, the notice is NOT about shutting down this app. It merely inquires about why the developer needs elevated access, something that is typically reserved for our business partners.&lt;p&gt;None of this is related to continuing to use the Twitter API or our commitment to enabling developers to build on our platform (Fabric, Gnip, our Ads platform, and the Twitter API).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>njs12345</author><text>&amp;gt; Immediately writing a public blog post is not negotiating in good faith.&lt;p&gt;Yet this seems to have been quite effective, given that the head of Developer Relations at Twitter is replying to this story on HN..</text></comment>
<story><title>Twitter shut down Emojitracker&apos;s access</title><url>https://medium.com/@mroth/u-1f647-person-bowing-deeply-5402c3ee5676#.z3df4bj6h</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kbenson</author><text>So?  If they want all these special access cases handled through Gnip, whether they are discounted or free, that&amp;#x27;s their call.  Just because it&amp;#x27;s through the commercial arm doesn&amp;#x27;t mean they would be incapable of handling special cases.&lt;p&gt;In any case, it&amp;#x27;s all speculation, there was never a dialogue, and the HN title as it current stands is probably inflaming this more than it should be.  Their access was not shut down (and the blog post&amp;#x27;s title and wording does does not say it &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; shut down, but that they believe they &lt;i&gt;will be&lt;/i&gt; shut down).  An email was sent, it was poorly worded, and the recipient overreacted (or at least prematurely reacted).  The responsible thing to do would have been to contact Twitter or the sender and discuss the needs and goals of the project, and see what they could offer.&lt;p&gt;Immediately writing a public blog post is not negotiating in good faith.</text></item><item><author>dangrossman</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s referring to Gnip still. They offer several levels of access and historical search, in addition to the firehose stream, for money.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; If they want all these special access cases handled through Gnip, whether they are discounted or free, that&amp;#x27;s their call.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s nothing in the mail suggesting they &amp;quot;want special access cases handled through Gnip&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>kbenson</author><text>&amp;gt; which provided no particular encouragement that there might be other terms available&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not entirely correct.  Under option 2 after mentioning it&amp;#x27;s commercial side, it says:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;There are also other solutions that offer varying levels of access as well as historical search.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not prominent (likely because they only want it pursued in special cases), and it&amp;#x27;s easy to miss, but it is there.</text></item><item><author>jrochkind1</author><text>So, the OP provided the email he recieved.&lt;p&gt;It did not ask him to clarify what he is doing, it did not say anything about bounds of acceptable use cases or what they might be, it did not encourage him to contact Twitter directly, or provide a link to do so. It did _not_ &amp;quot;inquire about why the developer needs elevated access&amp;quot;, there is no such inquiry in the email. It _did_ say elevated access was going away.&lt;p&gt;It said he could use the free API with rate limits, or the commercial Gnip API.&lt;p&gt;It kind of half-heartedly suggested he could &amp;quot;reply to this email&amp;quot; if he had &amp;quot;questions&amp;quot;.  From the email, there was no reason to think elevated access might still be available, it pretty clearly said it would _not_ be, so I&amp;#x27;m not surprised he didn&amp;#x27;t have any questions -- the email was quite clear (at saying something pretty different than you are saying).&lt;p&gt;So when you describe the email that goes out -- it does not seem to describe the one he received, according to him in the post. Are you talking about a different email? That he did not receive, or that you think he should have received in addition? Or do you actually think that email somehow communicates what you describe above? (It really really does not, which is why I think you must be thinking of a different email he did not receive or post, or you were internally misinformed about what the email was going to say).&lt;p&gt;With the email he actually pasted into the OP it is not surprising that he simply publicly notified his userbase and other interested parties that the service would be going away -- what else do you do when your upstream provider tells you the service is going away? This is all very standard and professional.&lt;p&gt;But, if you are saying that you do continue providing free elevated access to certain projects that seem worthwhile and meet some &amp;#x27;boudns of acceptable use&amp;#x27;, then that is nice, cool, I&amp;#x27;m glad Twitter is doing this.  (Maybe you should have told him that in the email though! And it would be great to actually advertise that fact, and what the bounds of acceptable use are, and how someone can get in touch with you to request access.)</text></item><item><author>CoolAssPuppy</author><text>Hi, I&amp;#x27;m Prashant. I run Developer Relations at Twitter. I want to clarify a few things here.&lt;p&gt;In the past, Twitter had little formality associated with granting elevated access. It was very much, &amp;quot;Hey, I want to do this cool thing!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Okay, sure, here you go.&amp;quot; As Twitter&amp;#x27;s platform business has matured to include many businesses building billions of dollars worth of social media monitoring and other tools, we&amp;#x27;ve formalized the process to becoming a Twitter Official Partner (partners.twitter.com). Over the last six months, we&amp;#x27;ve started contacting all of those API key holders with elevated access and asked them to clarify what they&amp;#x27;re doing. In some cases, we know the business and business owner and reach out personally. In other cases, like this one, the business is listed in our systems as &amp;quot;N&amp;#x2F;A&amp;quot;, so we send the template mail.&lt;p&gt;In the email, we encourage people who believe their app is within the bounds of acceptable use cases on Twitter to contact us directly, and provide a link to do so. The owner of this app elected to blog publicly about the situation before contacting us, which is unfortunate. We have contacted the owner of this app and hope to resolve this situation, as we do with hundreds of other developers on our platform. We do occasionally provide exceptions for apps that are non-commercial (not-for-profit, no ads, etc.)&lt;p&gt;Note also that in this instance, the notice is NOT about shutting down this app. It merely inquires about why the developer needs elevated access, something that is typically reserved for our business partners.&lt;p&gt;None of this is related to continuing to use the Twitter API or our commitment to enabling developers to build on our platform (Fabric, Gnip, our Ads platform, and the Twitter API).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mgalka</author><text>I think the email goes further than poorly worded. It says pretty clearly that access will be cut off, gives no suggestion that there could be a negotiation.</text></comment>