Economics 101: If you know that there is a limit to the number of customers you can support, why not scale the price the price up as demand for your product increases to curb that demand? You get to ensure that those who value the product the most get it. It seems like an interesting model to try in such circumstances.

I zipped over to the page, and Falcon Pro for Android is a buck, with the following message:

"And Please RELEASE your access token from the Twitter settings on the web if you're not using the app anymore."

Sorry, but if I bought it I own it. If this isn't a lesson on "Don't undervalue your product", I don't know what is.

Does that mean we should all thank Twitter for creating this scarcity so we can charge more for our products?

No, that means that you should adapt your business model to market reality.

It's not ideal, but those are the rules of the game. Optimize with these constraints, don't hope that doing or charging what others do will work. It's pretty clear to me that this product is worth more than a buck, and I don't even know what it does.

There's nothing to feel sorry over in this case. These guys were blessed (non-denominationally, of course) with a product that people want, and aren't able to capture the value in it. That's what running a business is all about. The product is only one (albeit large) component.

And this isn't irreparable. If too many customers breaks you, you're in the wrong business.

A lot of times that will mean not surviving in this case. It's rare that people will pay much for an app. Most apps are free just so they can get more downloads as it is.

No.. that's an artificial scarcity for resources your business needs.. not a scarcity for a product people will want to pay for. So there's nothing to thank.

> Economics 101: If you know that there is a limit to the number of customers you can support, why not scale the price the price up as demand for your product increases to curb that demand?

So you can get press like this. Duh.

Don't think too hard, it's just internet points. I upvote good comments, and only downvote trash. Having a different opinion shouldn't draw ire, lest we become Reddit.

upvote if you like it, downvote if you don't like it. simple?

I'm not sure what authors thought would happen when their apps hit this wall. Twitter has no reason to listen or help provide a living for these authors. I think it was an asinine thing of twitter to do, but also shows the fragility of relying on a third party API for your business.

Also, the author should withdraw their app from the play market now, otherwise they're going to end up with an awful lot of sales for an app that can no longer be used being bought by people who have no understanding as to what a token limit is.

What if they sold their code to a different entity, which would rebrand the app and use a different token? Marketing issues aside, wouldn't it buy them slots for 100k new users?

Or they could release version 2.0 as a separate app.

But then again: It's all speculation because we don't know how Twitter would handle those cases. And being at the mercy of another company is a really terrible position to be in.

I guarantee that if twitter sees you trying to get around their limits they will revoke your dev key. The reason they did this was to discourage third party apps in the first place, they wouldn't leave a loop hole allowing people to do this.

Twitter has already made it clear that they don't want third party clients on their platform. They didn't budge for Tweetbot, why would they budge for Falcon Pro? On the one hand, that's just an inherent risk to writing apps that rely on third party platforms. On the other, Twitter's behavior has been very shady around this whole matter, especially having once allowed third party clients. For a company that is so forward-looking in many ways, this type of behavior is a real step backward.

If a service limits how you can access it, and you don't want that: Don't complain or start a petition. Instead, use or build another service.

So instead of getting the API limit raised, you should start another Twitter? Really?

We don't need another Twitter. The model where one company owns an information channel like this is "broken". It is the CompuServe of short messages. We need a distributed architecture, so that nobody owns it. Like SMTP... oh wait, spam. Hmmm.

I think that there must be an architecture that solves that problem. Getting it adopted though, is a whole different ball game.

Someone's already done that, all you have to do is use it (maybe as well as twitter if you want):

https://app.net/

https://tent.io/

Here's why you shouldn't depend on Twitter or other closed platforms long term: http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been

Isn't app.net a Twitter clone, i.e not a federalised service, like tent.io seems to be?

Twitter could charge me a subscription fee for tokens that I could use on whatever application I wanted. That would remove some of the issues. Twitter makes money, I can use it however I want. But I still think something like tent.io is where we should go.

Just saying, Tent is great. Good community, great third party developer support, and though for now it's just a Rails app you can run on your server, it's going to be something more abstract like IRC. The co-founders also really know their stuff.

I'm one of the Tent architects. Thanks for the kind words :)

Tent is actually a protocol, so anyone can implement their own server. We don't use Rails, but we do have reference server implementation called tentd that is written in Ruby: https://github.com/tent/tentd

Seeing how many companies are unhappy with Twitter's new policies, it seems a bit strange that they don't band together and make something different/new.

I came here to say they should have charged for the app. But I just checked, and they do: It's not a free app, but one that costs $1.

The problem is it has 40k active installs but around 60k tokens taken up by pirating the app.

http://androidspin.com/2013/02/23/falcon-pro-for-twitter-rea...

There they refer to "active installs". Its still possible they sold 100K apps, everybody tried it (used a token), and 60K people deleted the app again. Those people then didn't reject their token in Twitter's app setting (which almost nobody does).

If it were indeed 60K pirates, that would really suck.

Don't forget that logging in with multiple accounts on the same install also uses a token per account.

The Play Store says the app has 10,000 - 50,000 installs.

times are tough when people have to pirate a $1 app.

One thing you could do is petition the users that aren't using the app to revoke access to twitter which would free up some seats. This would be tough though since your uusers paid for the app and could potentially lose a seat in the future. That's the approach that Tapbots took with TweetBot for Mac: http://tapbots.com/blog/news/where-did-the-tweetbot-for-mac-...

TweetBot must be nearing that limit too.

Their limit is twice their number of users/tokens at the time of the official announcement, since they had more than 100k users at that time. They'll hit it eventually, but it'll probably take some time.

Their OS X client only goes up to 100k, I imagine, though.

A tweet from the developer suggested that both apps ate out of the same pool. I could be recalling incorrectly though, as I can't find it now.

That sounds insane if true. Unfortunately, not implausible coming from Twitter.

I was incorrect.

> These tokens dictate how many users Tweetbot for Mac can have. The app’s limit is separate from, but much smaller than, the limit for Tweetbot for iOS. Once we use up the tokens granted to us by Twitter, we will no longer be able to sell the app to new users.

From: http://tapbots.com/blog/news/tweetbot-mac

TweetBot costs more. But in the long run it loses more and more features.

The last update got rid of the "show retweets" button because of API changes at Twitter.

Maybe we should use Buzz. Oh, oops. :-)

They were also forced to change the orientation of your own tweets (they used to be on the right), and to change the way tweets are displayed in the full view. Notably, they didn't comply with the rule that says that all tweets must have the twitter logo present somewhere on them. Hopefully that one doesn't come back to bite them.

via: https://twitter.com/falcon_android/status/305276990183854080