Twitter’s decision to force choke third party apps have obviously been met with largely negative reactions from many in the industry, from regular users to bloggers, journalists, and developers. The majority of outcries primarily stem from the fact that Twitter’s own mobile apps are not up to the quality of its competitors, with minimal features and no third party integration.
Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, who served on Twitter’s board of directors, clearly understood the changes that is being implemented on Twitter and stepped down from Twitter earlier this month. There is no way that Flipboard will not run afoul of Twitter’s new policies and it’s not in Flipboard’s best interest to adhere to them.
As it happens, shortly after McCue left Twitter, a number of news sources in Flipboard’s curated collection have been changed to Facebook if available. News feeds for GeekTyrant and Moviefone in FlipFilm collection for example are no longer being pulled from their Twitter accounts. As a result, there is no way to natively retweet or favorite those posts.
Dalton Caldwell who ran PicPlz and MixMedia Labs has turned his attention to creating a Twitter alternative called app.net, which is a clone of Twitter but imposes a $50 annual membership fee in return for no advertising.
app.net developers are being asked to contribute $100 a year which provides them full access to the platform’s API. While the developers and prominent bloggers are quick to embrace this alternative, given the paid nature of the service, it naturally won’t attract anywhere near as many members as Twitter.
App developer Marco Tabini decided to interpret Michael Sippey’s announcement with some annotations in an attempt to de-corporatize the blog post into something more understandable. It’s worth a read.
Across Twitter, there was a lot of anger aimed at Twitter for pushing away the very structure that had made the service popular. Developer Layton Duncan criticized the quality of Twitter’s official apps as being the reason for the outcry.
Not sure anyone would care about twitter’s announcement if their ‘official experience’ wasn’t the absolute worst possible on the platform.
— Layton Duncan (@PolarBearFarm) August 16, 2012
Macworld’s Jason Snell expressed a similar sentiment,
People would be less upset if Twitter’s official clients were best in class, @rsarver and @sippey. Degrading user experience sucks.
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) August 17, 2012
IconFactory’s Sean Heber thinks the No quadrant is needed for the other three to exist. IconFactory is of course the company behind Twitterrific, the first native Twitter mobile app ever made. It was launched on iOS in 2007, months before Apple allowed developers to create apps for the iPhone.
Twitter needs the upper right quadrant to make the other 3 worth a damn.
— Sean Heber (@BigZaphod) August 16, 2012
Anil Dash however, decided to rewrite Sippey’s blog post. He’s taken a more impartial view to the announcement and made the entire post seemingly more acceptable for people to digest without losing their cool.
Given Dash’s version of the announcement, had Twitter gone this route, it may not have been on the receiving end of developer frustration this morning. Or at least, not immediately. No doubt though, someone will have come up with a more blunt interpretation and we may end up where we are now.
[Image from Flickr/thomashawk]