It's so weird to think that Twitter used to be insignificant enough that a random software engineer could just tweet to the NY Time's social media account at will, without going through all the hoops of a social media team. Kudos to them for keeping it up, it's a great tweet.
I remember in the early days of the web an interviewer asked Ted Turner about the web and whether there would ever be a cnn.com. He went off on a rant about the web being I think a fad and that the answer would always be a no.
Two days later in August 1995 CNN Interactive launched at cnn.com. Press wanted to know if Turner had changed his mind. Guy in charge of the site said probably no but Ted doesn't understand the net at all. It was decided this was a slam dunk so we went ahead and launched it without telling him.
Turner never understood the Internet and it came back to bite him big time when after merging with Time-Warner in 1996 he went ahead with the others on the board in 1999 and bought AOL. In the crash that followed he proceeded to lose about three quarters of his net worth.
The New York Times has always been good at digital things. They have a decent API and have digitized a lot of historical articles from the 20th century.
Speaking of their API, a recently new one is the Archive API (I only noticed it this past year), which makes it much easier to download all of their article metadata. It used to be you had to paginate through their articles API, which was limited in its number of paginated results. Now you can get all of the articles and their metadata for any given year and month, which makes it a great place for practicing data mining and other classification techniques.
I've tried using their API and the one for comments is not reliable. It typically errors out (abruptly) when you're retrieving comments for an article. Posts/comments to their developer forum also typically goes unanswered for months and sometimes never.
If this isn't a perfect example of how your "hacky prototype" will never be replaced with a fully developed solution until absolutely necessary, I don't know what is.
