But what about services that Twitter replicates? The latest applications victimized by Twitter’s in-house team are photo-sharing platforms like TwitPic and YFrog
Back in May, we first heard that Twitter planned to launch its own image posting tool. Up until that point, third party apps were giving Twitter that function. Now that Twitter’s own photo tool has launched, it’s virtually declaring war on the developers who were responsible for creating what has been a very popular aspect of the site.
But you're right, if you take time to develop an app using their API, it might just get their attention and then they'll develop their own version and then cut you completely out.
The crucial difference here is between using a totally open-sourced technology like Storm (or Heron, if they release it) and being a consumer of a public API with a proprietary implementation, or making use of their platform/users/data.
Twitter can absolutely block you from their API. Or come out with a competing product that integrates with their own systems better than your product does. But if you're using Storm (or Scalding or whatever), there's really nothing they can do to screw with that.
I started looking at finagle, finatra and scrooge. i love all three projects. but at the same time, the documentation is really really bad.
if you have the same requirement as twitter, nice -- but if you detour even a little bit, you are going to have a shitty time (for example, for thrift, i wanted to use buffered codec instead of framed and there was not a single document explaining how to do it. i spent ~2h perusing unit tests to find a way which i don't know if it's correct or not).
