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Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Teh Internets Twitter Cuts Third Party Apps

Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 2:20 PM

Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s platform product manager, has told app developers to give up on making basic third-party Twitter clients because the service needs to “move to a less fragmented world.”

In a lengthy public statement, titled “consistency and ecosystem opportunities,” Sarver says, in no uncertain terms, “developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.”

Some folks are up in arms about this. I find it hard to get excited about it, personally, because I've never used any Twitter third-party clients. Twitter.com does everything I need Twitter to do, and it does it in a clean, simple way.

The case that Mathew Ingram at GigaOm makes—basically that Twitter picked up functionality from third party apps, learning how to foster the site into a social network—is a good one, but it's also not really relevant anymore. I haven't seen a third-party app bring anything new and useful to Twitter for some time now. Ingram fears a "corporate mono-culture" will take hold, that Twitter is out to protect its revenue streams at the cost of innovation. But I think something that Twitter also has to fear is complexity. It's a simple, easy-to-understand service, and while I'm sure developers will always be willing to add a bunch of features and functionality to Twitter, at some point it's going to stop being Twitter. That's the challenge Twitter is facing now.

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twitter.com doesn't do desktop notifications. That's pretty important to me.

Posted by arbeck

on March 16, 2011 at 2:42 PM

"...and it does it in a clean, simple way."

Perhaps if you consider looking at a blank white page clean and simple. (search for "twitter.com blank" for the sordid details)

Posted by wakka on March 16, 2011 at 2:51 PM

twitter's native phone apps are pretty shitty compared to most 3rd party ones. Seesmic blows them clean out of the water. And Twirl for simplicity and notifications on both Apple and Windows blows using the web interface away, too.

Posted by Joe Szilagyi

on March 16, 2011 at 3:39 PM

So if you're going to report on week-old tech news, it probably behooves you to include all of the updates and follow-ons that have happened since the news first broke.

Here's more context, from two days ago. There's probably more recent stuff yet: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/03/14…

The bottom line is that Twitter isn't threatening to kick anyone off, and isn't saying you can't build new clients. What they're saying is 1) they would like to see developers focus on value-add apps that don't just pull down the timeline, and 2) because they are highly focused on that basic client space, they don't think it's smart business to do the same and expect to make money for what Twitter gives away for free.

Nothing to see here. Tempest in a teapot. And a week old tempest, at that.

Posted by also on March 16, 2011 at 3:49 PM

I use Echophone because I manage several Twitter accounts and unlike anything official from Twitter, Echophone makes this easy. Echophone also allows you two different ways to re-Tweet: with or without comment. Again, the site does not allow you to do this... you have to copy and paste and retype and blah blah blah. Twitter needs to learn from the third-party apps if they want to cut them out of the race.

Blizzard does this in World of Warcraft: there's lots of addons you can get, and over time Blizzard has incorporated the best of these features into the standard interface.

Anyway, I'm not up in arms, but I'll be annoyed if I lose functionality.

Posted by Mary P. Traverse