Just When I Was Starting To Get Interested Again…
I’ve been noodling around w/ Buzzbird again, trying to add tabs to the interface. I was starting to maybe get psyched to do some work on it. Then today, I see this announcement from Twitter (thanks to @funkatron, lead developer of @spaz, for calling my attention to it). This is from https://groups.google.com/d/msg/twitter-api-announce/yCzVnHqHIWo/76QIxS6NXykJ :
Hey all, I’d like to give you an update about the state of the Twitter Platform and hopefully provide some much requested guidance.
Since this time last year, Twitter use has skyrocketed. We’ve grown from 48 million to 140 million tweets a day and we’re registering new accounts at an all-time record. This massive base of users, publishers, and businesses is a giant playground for developers to build their own businesses on, and this means the opportunity has grown for everyone.
With more people joining Twitter and accessing the service in multiple ways, a consistent user experience is more crucial than ever. As we talked about last April, this was our motivation for buying Tweetie and developing our own official iPhone app. It is the reason why we have developed official apps for the Mac, iPad, Android and Windows Phone, and worked with RIM on their Twitter for Blackberry app. As a result, the top five ways that people access Twitter are official Twitter apps.
Still, our user research shows that consumers continue to be confused by the different ways that a fractured landscape of third-party Twitter clients display tweets and let users interact with core Twitter functions. For example, people get confused by websites or clients that display tweets in a way that doesn’t follow our design guidelines, or when services put their own verbs on tweets instead of the ones used on Twitter. Similarly, a number of third-party consumer clients use their own versions of suggested users, trends, and other data streams, confusing users in our network even more. Users should be able to view, retweet, and reply to @nytimes’ tweets the same way; see the same profile information about @whitehouse; and be able to join in the discussion around the same trending topics as everyone else across Twitter.
A Consistent User Experience
Twitter is a network, and its network effects are driven by users seeing and contributing to the network’s conversations. We need to ensure users can interact with Twitter the same way everywhere. Specifically:
- The mainstream consumer client experience. Twitter will provide the primary mainstream consumer client experience on phones, computers, and other devices by which millions of people access Twitter content (tweets, trends, profiles, etc.), and send tweets. If there are too many ways to use Twitter that are inconsistent with one another, we risk diffusing the user experience. In addition, a number of client applications have repeatedly violated Twitter’s Terms of Service, including our user privacy policy. This demonstrates the risks associated with outsourcing the Twitter user experience to third parties. Twitter has to revoke literally hundreds of API tokens / apps a week as part of our trust and safety efforts, in order to protect the user experience on our platform.
- Display of tweets in 3rd-party services. We need to ensure that tweets, and tweet actions, are rendered in a consistent way so that people have the same experience with tweets no matter where they are. For example, some developers display “comment”, “like”, or other terms with tweets instead of “follow, favorite, retweet, reply” – thus changing the core functions of a tweet.
With this in mind, we’ve updated our Terms of Service: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms.
The Opportunity for Developers
Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no. (emphasis added)
If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users’ privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service. We have spoken with the major client applications in the Twitter ecosystem about these needs on an ongoing basis, and will continue to ensure a high bar is maintained.
As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way. This is already happening organically – the number and market share of consumer client apps that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking. According to our data, 90% of active Twitter users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.
In contrast, the number of successful applications and companies in the Twitter ecosystem that focus on areas outside of the mainstream consumer client experience has grown quickly, and this is a trend we want to continue to support and help grow. Twitter will always be a platform on which a smart developer with a great idea and some cool technology can build a great company of his or her own. And, with record user growth, there has never been a better time to build into Twitter.
Some key areas where ecosystem developers are thriving:
- Publisher tools. Companies such as SocialFlow help publishers optimize how they use Twitter, leading to increased user engagement and the production of the right tweet at the right time.
- Curation. Mass Relevance and Sulia provide services for large media brands to select, display, and stream the most interesting and relevant tweets for a breaking news story, topic or event.
- Realtime data signals. Hundreds of companies use real-time Twitter data as an input into ranking, ad targeting, or other aspects of enhancing their own core products. Klout is an example of a company which has taken this to the next level by using Twitter data to generate reputation scores for individuals. Similarly, Gnip syndicates Twitter data for licensing by third parties who want to use our real-time corpus for numerous applications (everything from hedge funds to ranking scores).
- Social CRM, entreprise clients, and brand insights. Companies such as HootSuite, CoTweet, Radian6, Seesmic, and Crimson Hexagon help brands, enterprises, and media companies tap into the zeitgeist about their brands on Twitter, and manage relationships with their consumers using Twitter as a medium for interaction.
- Value-added content and vertical experiences. Emerging services like Formspring, Foursquare, Instagram, and Quora have built into Twitter by allowing users to share unique and valuable content to their followers, while, in exchange, the services get broader reach, user acquisition, and traffic.
A lot of Twitter’s success is attributable to a diverse ecosystem of more than 750,000 registered apps. We will continue to support this innovation. We are excited to be working with our developer community to create a consistent and innovative experience for the many millions of users who have come to depend on Twitter every day.
As always, we welcome your feedback and questions.
Best, Ryan
So, that’s it then. Twitter grew and thrived in a flourishing ecosystem that encouraged active, open development. Hundreds of competing client apps were created to support the platform. Somehow this undesirable “inconsistent user experience” managed to shepherd in a new era of microblogging. But now Twitter doesn’t want us anymore.
And suddenly I really don’t feel like working on Buzzbird.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 11th, 2011 at 16:53 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
11 Responses to “Just When I Was Starting To Get Interested Again…”
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ipsi Says:
I think you misunderstand what they’re trying to do. To me, at least, it doesn’t sound like they’re saying “We don’t want any unofficial apps anymore”, but more like they’re saying “We want all unofficial apps to use the same terminology and to extend/advance the twitter experience in ways the official applications don’t”.
They’d have to be completely insane to discard third-party apps, because they’ll always be catering to people whose needs are not covered by the official apps. Maybe I’m wrong about that, and they want everyone to use the official apps exclusively, but it doesn’t sound like it…
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MarcelW Says:
Why give up? Give identi.ca a try. It’s Twitter rebuild with Open Source! And there are not so many clients for it as for Twitter.
Guess you’ll like the idea of Open Source.
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Antonio Says:
+1 identi.ca It’s not just another twitter, it’s open source and supports a federation model (you can subscribe to other people on different sites). Several people are deploying their own status.net server instead of using identi.ca. It’s totally doable for any web developer. So it’s an opportunity to go back to a model where nobody owns the infrastructure (think email) and also an opportunity for buzzbird (as status.net clients are few and far in between).
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Mark Richards Says:
We’re talking to a major new client in the UK about status.net so I can only endorse these comments.
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Rebecca F Says:
Why not keep at it and support identi.ca? Maybe if all developers helped many users would start using it more
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aslmdsa Says:
Don’t give up with this, this is the best twitter app ever, plus it works with all my old Mac computers, in fact im using it on my PPC iBook G4, this is the only twitter app for PPC Macs, and seriously, you are keeping my Mac alive.
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The Doctor Says:
Please do not give up on Buzzbird. It is one of the few F/OSS clients out there for Linux that uses the Mozilla libraries. It integrates nicely with our desktops (though it would be nice if it would load more than the last 45 tweets in our timelines). The new Twitter interface is, frankly, pants, and were it not for Buzzbird I think it is safe to say that many of us would have given up on it entirely.
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Bella Says:
“Twitter for Mac” is B.S. It’s very name is misleading as it’s for iPhone or iPad NOT Mac users. I like (not love) my Mac but I’m really getting sick of the limits. I will be downloading Buzzbird right now.
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Jim Says:
I’ve been using Buzzbird for a few days, and I must say that this is the sweetest Twitter app I’ve used. I’ve tried all the popular native and AIR ones, and there are one or more things I despise about all of them so far. I keep going back to my browser. So far Buzzbird is showing me that I don’t need to do that anymore…..Hope you get in the mood to carry on with this at some point down the line. Thanks.
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John Says:
Keep up the development of Buzzbird – it’s the only client I use because it’s open source, uncluttered and doesn’t use AIR.
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aris Says:
Buzzbird seems to fill the 10.4 PPC niche. Maybe just do that. To me it sounds like twitter is heading the appstore way of approving or refusing connections to apps.
Has EVERYONE turned to Micro$soft ??
