I don't really understand the need for a desktop client to begin with. The site works just fine and there's no extra software to install, just a web browser. That said, I also think an official Twitter Mac client is redundant now that Mountain Lion is out. The built in sharing and that thingy that swipes out from the right of the screen and lets you Tweet work fine for making posts then the site itself is just fine for consuming them.
I've never understood needing a desktop client for most websites really. To me they're just a waste of space, one more app to have running, and a constant distraction with all their alerts. My phone alerts me enough as it is. I'm on my Mac to get stuff done most of the time. I don't know, maybe I'm just an old fashioned 26 year old. To each their own I suppose.
Now, that last bit in the post I didn't quite get - "out of spite". Is there some political reason that Twitter would be spiteful toward the Mac platform? If so I don't understand why especially since Twitter is now built into iOS and OS X. Can someone explain that please?
For low values of fine, it takes a huge amount of resources, is pretty slow (especially on older hardware or browsers), doesn't — as far as I know — remember where you were in your timeline and what you have or have not read yet (and yes, I do like seeing all the tweets of the people I'm following), etc...
> The built in sharing and that thingy that swipes out from the right of the screen and lets you Tweet work fine for making posts
Except if you want to make arbitrary tweets or discuss things.
> the site itself is just fine for consuming them.
It does not.
> I've never understood needing a desktop client for most websites really.
Because there are situations and services for which a desktop client simply works better.
> To me they're just a waste of space
Great, here's an idea, don't use them if you don't like them. Others don't agree and will just keep using them. Deal?
Part of the value of the web is that it need not be confined to browsers. As an open protocol, content can be parsed by a variety of clients, and/or wrapped up in candy-coated shells (Fluid, etc), and/or served up via API for the benefit of native apps and mashups. Twitter wants to have their cake and eat it too: to benefit from the open web while contributing back as little as possible.
Also, the Twitter website is currently a terrible poster child for web apps: it's slow and bloated, to the point that I'll sometimes forget what I was going to tweet by the time it fully loads. If we were talking about the old site, which was clean and minimal HTML with a handful of progressive enhancements, it might be a different story.
> The built in sharing and that thingy that swipes out from the right of the screen and lets you Tweet work fine for making posts then the site itself is just fine for consuming them.
One simple concept that makes all of this fall flat: Multiple accounts.
If you're just looking to share things on Twitter, then the built-in stuff in OS X, or a bookmarklet, can work.
But if you use Twitter primarily as a newsfeed, to read/monitor things, and if you need to quickly check multiple accounts, doing so via the twitter.com website is extremely painful and slow.
Are you using the same site I am? It's faster than it used to be but it's still one of the slowest sites I know of. Not to mention that they randomly break core functionality for months at a time.
"I've never understood needing a desktop client for most websites really."
One less tab in my already inundated browser (20+ tabs open at any given time easy) makes a world of difference. At least for me, it's so much easier to swipe to a different desktop on my Mac than it is to hunt for a particular tab.
I'm using TweetDeck extensively as I now manage multiple accounts for my personal and business accounts. I really like that the Twitter for iPad version has this already built in.
This is the biggest lacking feature on the web version. I do hope they fix this.
Ah, man. Twitter for Mac is the only Twitter client that I really, genuinely like -- I was hoping for a direct port to Windows one day.
I can only hope that, if true, it's to make room for Twitter for Mac 2.0, rather than to convince people to sit there with Twitter.com open, hitting "$x new tweets" every few minutes.
I agree.. They are being idiotic right now. It feels like they are trying to become a Facebook-type website, but it's just not the same kind of activity.. People go to Facebook and click around and do all kinds of stuff.. Twitter is like a glorified RSS feed, and it will never be an "Explore and browse" experience on their website.
I have the Twitter for Mac client open all the time at the right edge of my 2nd monitor, and if they get rid of that, I'm just going to lose the habit of following Twitter.
Given the least of several crappy choices, I would rather see in-stream ads in the native Twitter client for Mac if it means they continue developing it..
Check out MetroTwit ( http://www.metrotwit.com/ ). I stumbled across it about two months ago and I've been using it ever since. It is a bit pricey for premium, but I bought it anyways (before it looked like Twitter was killing API access).
This sucks, another web app comes out; tells the world use me & develop for me, now f* off.
Now they are punishing everyone because they can't figure out how to make money by magic or ads.
I'm not arguing that it is a smart move to create a company on top of someone else's single purpose platform, but now they are going after the users.
Try charging for a change. 172 million active users x 10c a day = $516,000,000 mo, that's 3 bucks a month, yes most won't pay, but you can't really expect to make more than 1/2 billion dollars a month with micro blogging. And you can also charge a fair fee for developers, per API usage, you could probably double up the revenue.
With this very basic math, you don't need to cripple the user experience to place ads customers don't want to see.
I hope app.net get’s it right, it’s unlikely but would be great. I’ve supported it.
Most people I know who use a Mac desktop app for Twitter use TweetDeck (which was acquired by Twitter last year), so it wouldn't surprise me if they're deprecating the Mac Twitter client in order to make TweetDeck their standard desktop client across platforms.
Given that TweetDeck seems fated to be abandonware, I highly doubt it. Their Android client became all but unusable soon after the acquisition, and I've heard iOS was dropped completely.
TweetDeck was mostly a defensive acquisition to begin with (they had a huge market share, and deck.ly was a perceived threat).
The Mac client is what made Twitter useful for me. It has a dedicated place on the desktop and I can peek in any time quickly to see what's new. Like a personalized news ticker. In contrast, I can't stand using the website. So this might reduce my usage drastically and turn me into a mobile only user.
FWIW, the new Tweetbot for Mac client is pretty great. They took down the alpha link from their site, but if you can find a copy of the DMG, you can still register into the alpha.
Assuming this isn't a just a rumor, this reeks of corporate politics. Loren creates an app that gets peoples' attention. Loren leaves. Twitter for Mac slowly dies. I don't doubt that someone has a rationalization for this, but I have to question the motivations behind such a move. This sounds more like someone trying to get rid of someone else's "legacy", or at a minimum some "new guard" trying to get rid of the "old guard". The Twitter Mac App is well-designed and popular. What good reason could twitter have for killing this?
It sounds like twitter's attempts to "reinvent" itself are going to just push them further into irrelevance.
Of course, if this is just a rumor, then you can pretty much ignore the entirety of my rant.
It's pretty simple why Twitter would discontinue this app. They want to have a consistent user experience across all their clients and they will continue to introduce more rich content (such as Cards) from their brand partners. It's a lot easier for them to manage this consistency of experience by sticking to HTML5 for the client experience rather than maintaining and updating a set of native clients each time newer content features are released.
The heck? Even though it's integrated directly into the OS?
I'm hoping that the explanation is along the lines of Apple building their own Twitter client to replace the existing one.
Twitter having its own desktop client made it exciting like a whole new internet protocol: Usenet, the Web, IRC, email, Twitter. Having it just residing on that terrible website demeans it.
Having said that, the iPad client is vastly superior to the desktop one anyway. Although the select-text-and-tweet-it feature was a workflow with a unusually profound impact on social media.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Apple to build a Twitter client. They’re simply not interested in putting in that kind of work for a third party’s product/service, without incredibly strong incentive.
I believe the last time they did anything like this was on the iPhone, when they built custom apps for YouTube and Google Maps—but they did that almost out of necessity for the user experience, since there were no usable alternatives for those services. (Additionally, with the YouTube app, Apple wanted to encourage adoption of "HTML5" H.264 video, because the majority of video content still required Adobe Flash, unplayable on the iPhone.)
This is all besides the fact that Twitter is now strongly discouraging clients, which apparently now includes their own…
I only use Twitter via the Mac app and their iOS apps. Use of the web interface is painful and sluggish compared to the native apps. With them killing off the Mac app, I don't think I'll be using Twitter any more, except in the bathroom or in line when I'm bored (on my phone/iPad). It's even more bothersome that there isn't a clear reason for this.
I know it'd probably violate some terms and conditions, but is there any reason a desktop-client couldn't be developed that just "consumed" the website's content in a webview in order to present it in a more app-like style? Kind of a real-time scraper to change how Twitter is presented to the end-user.
[+] [-] bpatrianakos|13 years ago|reply
I've never understood needing a desktop client for most websites really. To me they're just a waste of space, one more app to have running, and a constant distraction with all their alerts. My phone alerts me enough as it is. I'm on my Mac to get stuff done most of the time. I don't know, maybe I'm just an old fashioned 26 year old. To each their own I suppose.
Now, that last bit in the post I didn't quite get - "out of spite". Is there some political reason that Twitter would be spiteful toward the Mac platform? If so I don't understand why especially since Twitter is now built into iOS and OS X. Can someone explain that please?
[+] [-] masklinn|13 years ago|reply
For low values of fine, it takes a huge amount of resources, is pretty slow (especially on older hardware or browsers), doesn't — as far as I know — remember where you were in your timeline and what you have or have not read yet (and yes, I do like seeing all the tweets of the people I'm following), etc...
> The built in sharing and that thingy that swipes out from the right of the screen and lets you Tweet work fine for making posts
Except if you want to make arbitrary tweets or discuss things.
> the site itself is just fine for consuming them.
It does not.
> I've never understood needing a desktop client for most websites really.
Because there are situations and services for which a desktop client simply works better.
> To me they're just a waste of space
Great, here's an idea, don't use them if you don't like them. Others don't agree and will just keep using them. Deal?
[+] [-] lukifer|13 years ago|reply
Also, the Twitter website is currently a terrible poster child for web apps: it's slow and bloated, to the point that I'll sometimes forget what I was going to tweet by the time it fully loads. If we were talking about the old site, which was clean and minimal HTML with a handful of progressive enhancements, it might be a different story.
[+] [-] sbarre|13 years ago|reply
One simple concept that makes all of this fall flat: Multiple accounts.
If you're just looking to share things on Twitter, then the built-in stuff in OS X, or a bookmarklet, can work.
But if you use Twitter primarily as a newsfeed, to read/monitor things, and if you need to quickly check multiple accounts, doing so via the twitter.com website is extremely painful and slow.
[+] [-] brigade|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hansy|13 years ago|reply
One less tab in my already inundated browser (20+ tabs open at any given time easy) makes a world of difference. At least for me, it's so much easier to swipe to a different desktop on my Mac than it is to hunt for a particular tab.
[+] [-] yesimahuman|13 years ago|reply
This is the biggest lacking feature on the web version. I do hope they fix this.
[+] [-] rhizome|13 years ago|reply
How do I add text to a retweet?
[+] [-] david_shaw|13 years ago|reply
I can only hope that, if true, it's to make room for Twitter for Mac 2.0, rather than to convince people to sit there with Twitter.com open, hitting "$x new tweets" every few minutes.
[+] [-] sbarre|13 years ago|reply
I have the Twitter for Mac client open all the time at the right edge of my 2nd monitor, and if they get rid of that, I'm just going to lose the habit of following Twitter.
Given the least of several crappy choices, I would rather see in-stream ads in the native Twitter client for Mac if it means they continue developing it..
[+] [-] MikeKusold|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karunamon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nateberkopec|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nvk|13 years ago|reply
Now they are punishing everyone because they can't figure out how to make money by magic or ads.
I'm not arguing that it is a smart move to create a company on top of someone else's single purpose platform, but now they are going after the users.
Try charging for a change. 172 million active users x 10c a day = $516,000,000 mo, that's 3 bucks a month, yes most won't pay, but you can't really expect to make more than 1/2 billion dollars a month with micro blogging. And you can also charge a fair fee for developers, per API usage, you could probably double up the revenue.
With this very basic math, you don't need to cripple the user experience to place ads customers don't want to see.
I hope app.net get’s it right, it’s unlikely but would be great. I’ve supported it.
[+] [-] ig1|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chimeracoder|13 years ago|reply
TweetDeck was mostly a defensive acquisition to begin with (they had a huge market share, and deck.ly was a perceived threat).
[+] [-] moizsyed|13 years ago|reply
Twitter skipped necessity for most people, went right to annoyance, heading down quickly to irrelevant.
[+] [-] ChiperSoft|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masklinn|13 years ago|reply
Pretty fair yes, same with the iPad client which has only seen anemic update, and at the same time they're trying to kill third-party clients.
Unless the strategy is to burn the ship to the keel, I really don't get what they're doing.
[+] [-] eropple|13 years ago|reply
Yup. I really like the awesome crashbug if you hit escape twice when closing a picture pop-up. Makes my day, let me tell you.
[+] [-] GBKS|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seiji|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eropple|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_baker|13 years ago|reply
It sounds like twitter's attempts to "reinvent" itself are going to just push them further into irrelevance.
Of course, if this is just a rumor, then you can pretty much ignore the entirety of my rant.
[+] [-] gk_jam|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tycho|13 years ago|reply
I'm hoping that the explanation is along the lines of Apple building their own Twitter client to replace the existing one.
Twitter having its own desktop client made it exciting like a whole new internet protocol: Usenet, the Web, IRC, email, Twitter. Having it just residing on that terrible website demeans it.
Having said that, the iPad client is vastly superior to the desktop one anyway. Although the select-text-and-tweet-it feature was a workflow with a unusually profound impact on social media.
[+] [-] mattparcher|13 years ago|reply
I believe the last time they did anything like this was on the iPhone, when they built custom apps for YouTube and Google Maps—but they did that almost out of necessity for the user experience, since there were no usable alternatives for those services. (Additionally, with the YouTube app, Apple wanted to encourage adoption of "HTML5" H.264 video, because the majority of video content still required Adobe Flash, unplayable on the iPhone.)
This is all besides the fact that Twitter is now strongly discouraging clients, which apparently now includes their own…
[+] [-] oomkiller|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malandrew|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelhoffman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uptown|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jorgem|13 years ago|reply