Apps of a Feather (group post from 3rd party Twitter app developers):
After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:
- Push notifications will no longer arrive
- Timelines won’t refresh automatically
If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.
We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We’ve been waiting for more than a year.
Read the whole piece for details. I can’t wrap my head around Twitter’s thinking here. Is it so expensive to support third party developers, so expensive to maintain a native Mac Twitter client?
Third party Twitter clients bring choice, robustness to the Twitterverse. Third party Twitter clients also bring inclusiveness. Eliminating this community, in my opinion, sends a terrible message. These are the folks who breathed life into Twitter in the first place. I suspect none of them got rich doing this, that their efforts were, in a large part, a labor of love.
Leaving these developers unsupported, and leaving them hanging, just seems plain wrong.
I don’t know what Twitter’s thinking here, but when third-party apps stop working, I leave Twitter.
I’ll also be leaving Twitter if they do this. They are really making a big mistake IMO.
I won’t leave Twitter when they do this. Then again, I’m unlikely to use it very often.
I would leave twitter too if I have to use the site. Twitter the concept is terrific. Twitter the company sucks on so many levels. Especially if you’re not on the extremely left side of the political spectrum.
Figures. I’d just bought my first Twitter client in ages.
This is a very good thing. Social media is rotting human civilization, and every use of it that people espouse (“Showing grandma picts from the recital”… etc.) as actually positive can be replaced with simple email.
Twitter cares about ad impressions, nothing else, I imagine.
They especially don’t care about the microcosm of power users who care about a third-party app or a native Mac app (as opposed to “using their website on your Mac”).
(I have always and continue to view Twitter as an abomination, and remain steadfast in my commitment to never use it.)
Tweetbot. I’d been using Twitterific on my phone for awhile in free mode. Was considering buying it, but I rarely use the service on my phone.
Email is not simple. It’s a tedious, multi-step process whose residue is the opposite of ephemeral.
Clearly stated. Thank you.
I can tell you exactly what Twitter is thinking, but you won’t like it.
They no longer see themselves as a simple publish-subscribe service—they’ve been long trying to become a algorithmically-curated, ad-driven social network (because, you know, Facebook does it, so it must work). In order to push a single product vision, they must correspondingly control the client experience.
Unfortunately for them, they left the barn door open (back when they were a simple service) and so now a chunk of their userbase uses the product in a way that is no longer their focus. They don’t want this anymore. At the same time, their API is useful for certain business applications (linking to other products, for instance).
So, they’re slowly supporting the use case that lets you have custom Twitter clients just to read feeds less and less. It sounds like you can use the new API to read tweets, but not with streaming abilities, which is fine for integration with other services, but not so much for 3rd-party clients.
I finally gave up Tweetbot when new Twitter threading didn’t make it there, and now use the Twitter client. I don’t like the algorithmic feed, so I just use Twitter less. This is probably good for my health, so I guess I can’t complain?
They’re going to lose some of their power userbase, but it’s pretty clear they don’t care anymore. That said, I hope I’m wrong and the Apps of a Feather effort works—there are some amazing Twitter clients there.
After being a heavy user for nearly 9 years, I’ve been off Twitter since January and to be honest, I haven’t missed it very much at all. Oh, I miss some of the great people I’ve gotten to know and some of the quick access to info that involves my interests in astronomy & NASA, but overall, I’ve been quite surprised at just how little I even think about it on a daily basis anymore.
This will end my involvement all together, that along with all the idiots that have permeated social media, especially since last year. Now that I will loose Tweetbot as a viable client, I’m done.
All good things…
Tweetbot just defines Twitter for me.
This also means the end of Mac clients since Twitter ditched their native Mac app a while back. You’ll have to use a web browser like an animal.
There are few things in life I hate more than soul sucking, brain crushing, fracking email.
I have begun researching everything I need to do to delete my Twitter account. I knew deleting Facebook would have hidden things to be aware of, like making sure I didn’t return to webpages I used Facebook login at after I set my Facebook account to delete.
If this goes through I intend to wipe every like and every tweet and retweet, clear out every bit I can. And then delete my Twitter account. I refuse to use the Twitter service unless I can access through Tweetbot.
I use Twitter as a curated news source. I have spent a massive amount of time crafting my follow, mute, and block list so that the timeline has what I want as accessed via Tweetbot. That ends, so will my use.
I will spend more time using Apple News. I might even dig into the dusty corner of RSS readers again. Any decent RSS readers on iOS that sync to Mac?
Twitterrific?
In reaction to the initiative, Twitter announced yesterday that they will provide support to the outside developers for the new APIs that will replace “streaming services.”
https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/982346370882461696
“Any decent RSS readers on iOS that sync to Mac?”
Decent is subjective but I use Feedly on both.
I use Reeder and like it a lot. Syncs across my devices and has nice integrations with things like Instapaper and Twitter.
Well, has nice integrations with Twitter for now.
I love Tweetbot. I hope they can find some way through this.
Likewise. Too bad it’s Twitter’s owners who are lost in the weeds.
Third-party app users are a tiny subset of Twitter. It literally only matters to tech nerds. If third-party apps went away tomorrow, almost nobody on Twitter outside the tech nerd bubble would care.