>Moral of the story: be-wary of developing applications with dependency to a platform.
I've come to the conclusion that this belongs in the category of "Make regular backups" and "Use unique passwords and a password manager".
Everyone knows they should, and yet so many people refuse to accept that it could happen to them. I don't know if it's hubris or arrogance. How many times has this lesson been displayed in the last week on HN, let alone the last 4 years. iOS, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Twitter, often Facebook.
Not me! My app is too {small, unique, creative} to be a problem.
Sort of. Writing a program is usually a fun endeavor. Having the platform owner come and stomp on you, regardless of how much right they have to do it, is still a pretty shitty thing to do.
To be fair, if your application revolves around producing a tweetspam-filtered copy of Twitter's stream of tweets, it's not really possible to make that twitter-independent. Competitors like facebook and google+ don't really have a spam problem.
You list Facebook as being an equal problem for developers. I remember seeing articles on the other four companies you list, but not Facebook. Did I miss something? Honest question: what did I miss?
Either people are stupid, or despite a few publicized cases of apps getting shut down, the benefit of being able to build on someone else's API outweighs the risk. It's probably a bit of both.
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>Moral of the story: be-wary of developing applications with dependency to a platform.
I've come to the conclusion that this belongs in the category of "Make regular backups" and "Use unique passwords and a password manager".
Everyone knows they should, and yet so many people refuse to accept that it could happen to them. I don't know if it's hubris or arrogance. How many times has this lesson been displayed in the last week on HN, let alone the last 4 years. iOS, LinkedIn, Craigslist, Twitter, often Facebook.
Not me! My app is too {small, unique, creative} to be a problem.
Sort of. Writing a program is usually a fun endeavor. Having the platform owner come and stomp on you, regardless of how much right they have to do it, is still a pretty shitty thing to do.
To be fair, if your application revolves around producing a tweetspam-filtered copy of Twitter's stream of tweets, it's not really possible to make that twitter-independent. Competitors like facebook and google+ don't really have a spam problem.
You list Facebook as being an equal problem for developers. I remember seeing articles on the other four companies you list, but not Facebook. Did I miss something? Honest question: what did I miss?
Either people are stupid, or despite a few publicized cases of apps getting shut down, the benefit of being able to build on someone else's API outweighs the risk. It's probably a bit of both.
The problem is that good data is often tightly locked up.