Twitterrific, and a lot of these early iOS clients, really helped defined the Twitter service, and even more so, our interface idioms for mobile apps.
Right from the bird’s mouth, which by the way, they created, not Twitter…
“Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!”
It's hard to overstate how much of an impact third party twitter clients have had on Twitter and the broader mobile landscape - like the post mentions, the word 'Tweet' and blue bird twitter icon came from third party clients! The Tweetie app invented pull-to-refresh, used by every (both) mobile operating systems.
I maintain the position I have had ever since Twitter sold people on the ridiculous idea of "API keys": the correct path has always been adversarial interoperability (as we did back forever ago when people built alternative apps for instant messaging services); if Twitterrific had been designed to use the same API and authority as the official app--maybe as a fallback, if nothing else--Twitter would not have been easily able to kill it... they could try, but it would be a cat and mouse game at best, and the only real recourse they would have would have been to try to detect API abnormalities (which Twitterific could quickly fix, and frankly the skeleton crew at Twitter today likely couldn't do well anyway) to directly punish the end users for continuing to insist on logging in with alternative clients (as Snapchat is forced to do); and, while it is easy to just shut off Twitterific's API key and tell the users "too bad", I think having to take the war to Twitterific's userbase (as the app would be able to keep working forever, with only momentary brownouts) would be a tougher pill for Twitter to swallow, given that it had way too much marketshare at this point.
Unauthorized “gray” third-party clients were a more viable option in the days when vendors couldn’t easily update first-party client program installations in the wild, so the API had to be backwards compatible.
But it’s not really like that for Twitter. They can do rapid updates to the iOS and Android apps, and any holdovers of old client versions would be a relatively small segment.
I recall Microsoft tried to build and maintain their own YouTube client for Windows Phone around 2011-12. That’s probably the last time a major tech company tried this approach and it was out of massive desperation. Google seemed to make a special effort to break the app.
All your suggestions lead to a terms of service violation for the Icon Factory and would likely result in their Apple developer accounts being banned, especially if Elon wanted to pursue it.
Getting their developer accounts banned would affect their other products, as well as any future products.
Aside from all the above, the vast majority of their Twitterrific customers doesn't understand API keys and will complain and request app and subscription refunds, likely also leading to developer account problems.
Falken's Law applies here: The only winning move is not to play.
I maintained an adversarial browser extension with around 100k users that added stuff like tooltips and keyboard shortcuts to a browser game, for about 3 years. The reward was the developer copying a couple of my easiest ideas, then sending me legal threats and banning a bunch of my users (who were their paying customers). The engineering time they spent (quite a bit) trying to detect my extension or break it could have been spent doing things like adding ARIA roles and alt text, but they don't care about people with disabilities.
I kept it going for 3 years because I cared about the people who used it, and the developer struggled to block it because it's hard to outwit someone who worked on web browsers. In the end though, it's not worth doing free work for a company that doesn't respect the needs of their customers. Go elsewhere.
Your jailbreak spirit lives on, a big thank you! A tweak exists for the official client to clean up a lot of the issues:
https://github.com/BandarHL/BHTwitter
Hopefully this now gets more support with the antics that Twitter has pulled with these 3rd party clients.
Twitterrific makes money; it has a whole team of developers whose salaries are paid by them existing in the App Store and taking money via subscriptions. Adversarial interoperatability would result in Twitter sending the team a cease and desist, and given that their product isn't particularly decentralized or hard to enforce legal action against, they would probably lose the lawsuit or fold early. I think you need to understand that the number of people who want to be in this kind of relationship with an entity far larger than them is pretty small, and clients of this sort are invariably some sort of open source script or small project by a single developer without much to lose. A Twitterriffic where you could lose your access to you account and its many thousands of followers is not actually something people will use.
While I think I've come around to this position, the big question here that comes to mind is: does this even work for iOS apps, given Twitter could just go to Apple (the App Store team, I guess) over it?
>and frankly the skeleton crew at Twitter today likely couldn't do well anyway
You can just use attestation to make sure that people are using the official twitter client and not a third party one. There is no cat and mouse game no that mobile platforms offer security against malicious third party clients.
I don't know the specifics about Twitter's API saga over the years but... why isn't this the case? Why does Twitter need to be involved on the client side with consumption of the API?
Lesson learned: don't build your business on top of someone else's business, especially if you're not paying (under contract) to access that other service.
It’s obviously bad business (for Twitter given the cost / benefit) and show’s Elon’s lack of empathy but also demonstrates the perils of having a user like him run the show.
He literally couldn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect his own experience of the product. Features, clients, parts of the world, even users - if Elon isn’t interested then it will probably go or be ignored.
> Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!
Wow they really helped make Twitter what it is today
To be honest, I expect Elon and Twitter will be discontinued at some point, without any good feelings and thanks on the part of any of their customers, unlike the app developers Twitter just killed.
What is needed is to do Twitter again, in some way that is more open and supportive of client apps, but still has the immediacy and global search that Twitter has. Mastodon has its uses, but it isn't a real replacement. Twitter was always a terrible business, but an incredibly useful idea. The idea needs to exist.
"Mastodon has its uses, but it isn't a real replacement."
Or the global community of people with some technical proficiency keeps developing Mastodon (or forks, or OSS replacements) so that it is a real replacement.
My stance on future Twitter-like proprietary social networks is clear and unequivocal: Never again.
Imagine if Elon builds his "x app" where everything about you is stored, your money, contacts, social networks and all of the sudden he wakes up on a random Tuesday and decide that he wants to ban everyone who hurted his feelings the day before.
I know him blocking access to third party apps might not be related but it sets a precendent (which already everyone knows) that doing business with him is not safe.
If the issue is that 3rd party clients don't show ads, why not just require them to do so? Surely that's a better alternative than shutting them down completely.
Some 3rd party apps did mention before they would comply with such a rule if an ads API existed. But they don't exist and now with almost no dev left at twitter, it was unlikely to happen anyway.
What are the chances Reddit goes down this path and kills the many amazing third-party clients? I absolutely love the one I use and detest the official Reddit app.
Reddit has learned a lasting lesson from Digg's self-destruct, that's why old.reddit.com is still around too. It's been over a decade so they might be starting to forget but perhaps the Twitter meltdown will be a good refresher. Don't piss off your core userbase.
Given the amount of users that use and evangelize Apollo for iOS (including myself), that might hurt Reddit more than the loss of third-party apps for Twitter.
Wonder if they will use some of the IP they've built up to move into the Mastodon Client space. While there is already a nice crop of Mastodon clients, it seems like there is no dominant 3rd party client yet.
That is exactly what Tapbots has done with Ivory - Taking Tweetbot and using that as the basis for a Mastodon client. I've been using it for the past few weeks and it's fantastic https://tapbots.com/ivory
There was an opportunity here to open Twitter and position it’s API to become a message broker and discovery service. Have a heathy ecosystem of third party clients. Perhaps require users to have “Blue” subscription to use third party clients with some revenue share agreements.
The problem is that those people willing to pay for such a service are exactly those who advertisers are most interested in. If you have the disposable income to use an ad-hiding third party client for the cost of an extra subscription, they will outbid you in an effort to capture that income (and more) in their business instead.
If I didn't know better, I'd be wondering if Musk was shorting Twitter's stock. Has anyone ever managed to do so much damage to a company in such a short amount of time?
People have long speculated that Musk found some way to profit off of running Twitter into the ground, since from day 0, that appeared to be his obvious strategy.
No one has yet found a way that he'll profit from Twitter's decline. So he's obviously doing what he thinks is best, it is seemingly going strongly in the opposite direction, but only time will tell how it ends up.
One thing's almost certain, he's not going to make money running Twitter into the ground.
Sad times. The third-party clients have always been _the_ way to access Twitter. One of my early favorites was Twinkle, made by Tapulous. It was pretty awesome, and even included searching for tweets from nearby users! This was pretty revolutionary and seriously fun in 2008. It helped us organized some Vancouver "tweetups" in 2008 and 2009.
(Of course most recently I had settled on TweetBot, which was an amazing iOS Twitter client)
Some stuff about Twinkle, since I didn't see anyone else talking about it:
This isn't the first time Twitter has done this, 3rd party apps used to be massive maybe 10 years ago until they made an API policy change abruptly. IMO the ecosystem never fully recovered from this. One service I enjoyed was "FavStar" which would allow you to find the best/funniest tweets or reward people for tweeting something good.
I’m sure it’s been said before but if Twitter wants to get away from advertising, this action seems like such a wasted opportunity.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem all that difficult to have phased in an access fee for the API that’s charged to the app developers. There are lots of ways you could do this.
From Twitter’s perspective, they’d get all the advantages of the third party ecosystem while externalising the risk of moving to a paid model.
Twitter could have kept the “advertising supported” business to itself, at least for a while, while watching the competing apps settle on a price point.
I mean the data this would have given Twitter about monetisation would have been fantastic. And at some point they could have released their own paid version too.
[+] [-] perardi|3 years ago|reply
Right from the bird’s mouth, which by the way, they created, not Twitter…
“Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!”
And “pull-to-refresh”? Tweetie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh
[+] [-] madeofpalk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|3 years ago|reply
Official Twitter Statement on Revoking API Access to 3rd Party Devs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34416416 - Jan 2023 (11 comments)
Twitter kicking off a developer API campaign on January 16, 2023 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410624 - Jan 2023 (107 comments)
Tweetbot is back down again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34396664 - Jan 2023 (210 comments)
The Shit Show - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34393485 - Jan 2023 (312 comments)
Twitter API Page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34387834 - Jan 2023 (98 comments)
Twitter's API is down? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34363743 - Jan 2023 (408 comments)
[+] [-] saurik|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|3 years ago|reply
But it’s not really like that for Twitter. They can do rapid updates to the iOS and Android apps, and any holdovers of old client versions would be a relatively small segment.
I recall Microsoft tried to build and maintain their own YouTube client for Windows Phone around 2011-12. That’s probably the last time a major tech company tried this approach and it was out of massive desperation. Google seemed to make a special effort to break the app.
[+] [-] runjake|3 years ago|reply
All your suggestions lead to a terms of service violation for the Icon Factory and would likely result in their Apple developer accounts being banned, especially if Elon wanted to pursue it.
Getting their developer accounts banned would affect their other products, as well as any future products.
Aside from all the above, the vast majority of their Twitterrific customers doesn't understand API keys and will complain and request app and subscription refunds, likely also leading to developer account problems.
Falken's Law applies here: The only winning move is not to play.
[+] [-] kevingadd|3 years ago|reply
I kept it going for 3 years because I cared about the people who used it, and the developer struggled to block it because it's hard to outwit someone who worked on web browsers. In the end though, it's not worth doing free work for a company that doesn't respect the needs of their customers. Go elsewhere.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|3 years ago|reply
Ceding users' screens doesn't work with an ad-based business model.
[+] [-] Skates1616|3 years ago|reply
Hopefully this now gets more support with the antics that Twitter has pulled with these 3rd party clients.
[+] [-] saagarjha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Klonoar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rweichler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgbrenner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charcircuit|3 years ago|reply
You can just use attestation to make sure that people are using the official twitter client and not a third party one. There is no cat and mouse game no that mobile platforms offer security against malicious third party clients.
[+] [-] placatedmayhem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|3 years ago|reply
You wanna shut them down to show more ads? Fine. But at least communicate and let them know upfront. What a sh*t show.
[+] [-] tiffanyh|3 years ago|reply
Lesson learned: don't build your business on top of someone else's business, especially if you're not paying (under contract) to access that other service.
[+] [-] klelatti|3 years ago|reply
He literally couldn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect his own experience of the product. Features, clients, parts of the world, even users - if Elon isn’t interested then it will probably go or be ignored.
[+] [-] dusing|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] culi|3 years ago|reply
Wow they really helped make Twitter what it is today
[+] [-] coldcode|3 years ago|reply
What is needed is to do Twitter again, in some way that is more open and supportive of client apps, but still has the immediacy and global search that Twitter has. Mastodon has its uses, but it isn't a real replacement. Twitter was always a terrible business, but an incredibly useful idea. The idea needs to exist.
[+] [-] jaredcwhite|3 years ago|reply
Or the global community of people with some technical proficiency keeps developing Mastodon (or forks, or OSS replacements) so that it is a real replacement.
My stance on future Twitter-like proprietary social networks is clear and unequivocal: Never again.
[+] [-] KerrAvon|3 years ago|reply
Seems like what you should be asking for is Mastodon, but with performance improvements and improved search.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zouhair|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __warlord__|3 years ago|reply
I know him blocking access to third party apps might not be related but it sets a precendent (which already everyone knows) that doing business with him is not safe.
[+] [-] frankjr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeromegv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drexlspivey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binkHN|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minimaxir|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arepublicadoceu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yokoprime|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madeofpalk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdmglr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teeray|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binkHN|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abrookewood|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ascagnel_|3 years ago|reply
And if a company officer is shorting the company’s stock, that sounds an awful lot like a breach of fiduciary duty.
[+] [-] EricE|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|3 years ago|reply
No one has yet found a way that he'll profit from Twitter's decline. So he's obviously doing what he thinks is best, it is seemingly going strongly in the opposite direction, but only time will tell how it ends up.
One thing's almost certain, he's not going to make money running Twitter into the ground.
[+] [-] amatecha|3 years ago|reply
(Of course most recently I had settled on TweetBot, which was an amazing iOS Twitter client)
Some stuff about Twinkle, since I didn't see anyone else talking about it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080718210738/http://tapulous.c...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RSB2MT01BQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd4u-E5qmxE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_hxXOYIqrQ
[+] [-] partiallypro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doctor_eval|3 years ago|reply
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t seem all that difficult to have phased in an access fee for the API that’s charged to the app developers. There are lots of ways you could do this.
From Twitter’s perspective, they’d get all the advantages of the third party ecosystem while externalising the risk of moving to a paid model.
Twitter could have kept the “advertising supported” business to itself, at least for a while, while watching the competing apps settle on a price point.
I mean the data this would have given Twitter about monetisation would have been fantastic. And at some point they could have released their own paid version too.
Oh well. I suppose Elon knows what he is doing.
[+] [-] erenkaplan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klyrs|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PenguinCoder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|3 years ago|reply
I'd question the 'benefit' bit; this seems clearly bad for Twitter.