This is what happens when you rely on a service you have no control over. It'll happen now, it'll happen later, but at some point, somebody is going to decide they make more money turning the thing you rely on off.
The risk is always that they decide the service you're relying on is too niche/is being replaced by something else and you need to adapt.
Which is a thing that happens.
The big stuff like EC2 isn't likely to go away before Amazon itself goes away, but there are piles of other smaller services that may or may not. It's not Google in terms of getting rid of capabilities, but they sunset APIs and capabilities all the time. For good reason! It's probably not a good idea to be running Python 2.7 today, and there's no reason why they should want to support it.
So you're being snide but yes, this is a concern, and the deprecation schedule is solely under Amazon's control.
If at some point the cloud goes bust because on-prem is the new hotness (what's old is new again) in 10 or 20 years, you bet your damn bippy AWS will pull the plug when it makes sense for Amazon to do so.
And that's a product you pay for. If you're not paying for the product (I don't know if Twitter was offering free access to its APIs) then you're relying on the good will and support of the person/company providing the product/API and at any moment they can change their mind. As we've seen here.
If you rely on someone else's platform, you are at their mercy. If you don't believe me, wait another few days for yet another app developer to complain about getting locked out of an app store, or some payments platform locking them out of their account to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Pro Tip: Don't build "your life's work" around a third-party API over which you have no definitive control. Moving forward, the author would do well to keep that "top of mind."
His "life's work" is a fresh coat of paint on someone else's creation, which is of questionable value to begin with. And using his mother's death as a comedic prop in a public rant doesn't exactly engender sympathy.
you do realise that twitterific shaped a LOT of twitter in the early days, like he says in the article? that the concepts they pioneered in their app, which twitter didn't have (they didn't have a first party app for quite a while) are integral concepts to the very foundations of twitter?
i don't think his mum's death was a comedic prop, it was a storytelling device. what kind of person looks at that metaphor and says: i don't like this person, i will belittle their entire life?
Calling it a comedic prop is the charitable interpretation.
> We loved this app like I loved my mom.
He genuinely loves an app like his own mother? It says a lot about his opinion of his mother that an app can be on the same level in his estimation. For his sake and his mother's I hope this was an attempt at gallows humor, but it's a pretty horrible one.
> what kind of person looks at that metaphor and says: i don't like this person, i will belittle their entire life?
I'm not belittling his life, I'm belittling the phrase "life's work" used by the parent commenter. I wonder if the article's author would even consider it his life's work. He appears to run an entire company with a number of other projects.
I'm aware of the innovations. Personally I don't find them all that profound, but either way, it's just an alternate UI for a social network that isn't a particularly positive influence on the world. People in this thread painting it as some sort of magnum opus are being a bit grandiose, don't you think?
Look, if I was this guy I'd be pissed too. But elevating a Twitter client to the level of his recently deceased mother is in unbelievably poor taste, no matter how "groundbreaking" it was.
How many people would be gracious? Why should anyone be?