The writing has been on the wall for third-party Twitter apps for years. It’s why I stopped posting from @manton in 2012, and ultimately built Micro.blog. Now apps have an even more uncertain future if Twitter doesn’t change course.
@manton does this mean more features coming with micro.blog? There a lot of great devs soon to be out of a job.
@JeffPerry New features are always coming, including something very big soon. Always happy to welcome Twitter devs here too!
@vasta Me too. I think it will be a major disruption for what people are used to in Tweetbot and Twitterrific.
@manton well on droid and iOS you can at least use the twitter app - but they have announced they are stopping Dev of their own app on Mac - so ... web only on the Mac? That sucks.
... bring on the cheese!!
It is sad for the third party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific, but I think in the long run it will be bad for Twitter too. Many of the things that make Twitter what it is today came from third party apps. Unfortunately in it’s effort to please Wall Street, Twitter seems to have forgotten it’s users.
@manton You’re right: this seems very similar to the initial Twitter crackdown on 3rd party apps that gave app.net a lot of its energy when it launched (it didn’t last, but a lot of folks on ADN were techy types infuriated with Twitter)
@donmacdonald I agree. In a way, this feels like Twitter "finishing the job" of killing apps that it started years ago. The only question is whether they'll see it through.
@manton it seems shortsighted (haha it’s Twitter!) as third party apps probably don’t have a huge user base, but I imagine the users they do have are disproportionately elite contributors, like journalists, authors, etc.
@manton well, to be honest Twitter can open or close their API like they want. It’s there service and server costs. Afaik not a single developer ever got charged for using there Streams api and so on. That said, time for a more open web. Maybe it’s the long awaited push in the right direction to speed up the open web and indieweb movement a bit.
@renem That's certainly true. Part of the disappointment is that the attitude from Twitter to developers has shifted so completely in the last 10 years. Time to move on.
@manton I imagine Twitter management believe that Twitter is too universal and vital a service for users to leave in any substantial way (“If you want to get support from Foo, you @-mention/DM them on Twitter, so both Person X and Company Y have to be on Twitter!”). While maybe that’s true in the short term, you can actually get customer support from a company’s website or call center, news from a newspaper website, post thoughts via a blog, and chat via any number of alternate “social networks”, so even their duopoly in the network effect is unlikely to last. Each misstep is just like another chip or crack in a windshield or a pebble starting down a mountainside…slowly, then all at once.
@manton Yeah. If it wasn’t for these very developers who helped make the platform popular in the first place, Twitter might have become something very different.