“Twitter set off alarm bells across the web in recent weeks when it ended its partnership with LinkedIn and reiterated its warning that it would be cracking down on the terms of its API. The company didn’t offer any explanation for why it removed tweets from LinkedIn, but speaking with sources familiar with the company’s plans, The Verge has learned that major changes are coming in the next few months which will move Twitter from an open platform popular among independent developers towards a walled garden more akin to Facebook.” If I can’t use Boid, I’m not sure I would still use Twitter.
This will always happen when you thrush your business to a 3rd party.
If some product/API does not bring enough money home, it will be terminated without any regret.
I think many young developers don’t know how it used to be back in the old days, when free in computing was a foreign word and we had to pay for everything.
Actually it used to be free in every sense in the beginning. That it became capitalized, primarily in USA (one of those countries in the axis of evil).
Only if you mean the very beginning.
I started with computers with the age of 8 around 1984 and always had to pay, or take “shortcuts”.
There was nothing to have for free.
I began with computers around the same time, and never had problem getting stuff for free, though it did require a lot of typing in dubious code from magazines
– unless you wrote your own game from scratch (C64 and Amstrad CPC-664).
Then came a time primarily with proprietary software and now it is a battle between pay-for-software and pay-for-service, and those who want to combine them :p
I imagine someone had to pay for those magazines.
Irrelevant. The price of the media is irrelevant to the price of the software itself.
You just won’t admit to yourself, you defined ‘beginning’ incorrectly.
Type-in software in magazines was often (perhaps even typically) a work of somebody in the stuff; or commissioned by the magazine to some ~outsider. Either way, more than just its dissemination paid from the price of the media.
No when you are a 8 year old kid that is supposed to buy such magazines with his own money.
For sure those magazines did not felt like free to me.
I was quite precise by stating the year.
Many users of free software on desktop think that Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Google services, etc. is different because it’s in the cloud, it’s web service so it doesn’t matter if it’s proprietery, but eventually theirs proprietary nature always come up restricting users in something. This is the perfect example. Freedom of users is always behind profit.
Identica, here we come
Singing birds are usually kept in cages after all – all is fine as long as they can twit…
If a service like Twitter was invented 20 years ago, it would have been a decentralized service with an open protocol. Everyone would be able to run his own twitter service and all those “twitter” servers would be able to communicate with each other.
These days every big company needs to have its own closed social network with its own proprietary protocols.
What, kind of like Gopher? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Stagnation
There were BBSs, FidoNet, giving not totally unlike kinds of service – also with public messages. Usenet not far from that, too.
Thing is… they were a bit of a mess (and, partly also because of that, rather niche)
OTOH, some very centralised, similar in nature services did exist 20+ years ago (12:30 in http://archive.org/details/frenchtech1 ), and probably saw much more adoption.
Network effects (the people, societal kinds) partly promote centralised stuff.