Michael Tsai collected a variety of comments and links about the #BreakingMyTwitter changes Twitter just made that broke 3rd party Twitter clients. There’s just a ton of great reading here.
I would start with this blog post from Twitter’s own Ron Johnson trying to explain Twitter’s intentions.
One take missing from Michael’s collection is this post from John Gruber, which specifically addresses his preference for his 3rd party client of choice, Tweetbot (which I use as well).
One thing that struck me is this bit, from the end of John’s post:
> When Rob Johnson shared his email this morning about Twitter and third-party clients, he did so by tweeting two screenshots of the message. Those screenshots show he uses a third-party email client on his iPhone. So my simple argument to Johnson is this: I prefer a third-party Twitter client for the same reason you prefer a third-party iOS email client. One size doesn’t fit all.
Exactly.
Yes, Tweetbot, yes.
Gruber misses a key point: email is based on an open standard. Twitter is not, and the company who might have once envisioned being a platform now believes themselves to be a product. John doesn’t like algorithmic feeds (and neither does almost anyone else here), but Twitter does, and they’re not interested in the opposing opinion. 🙂
I believe it’s still worthwhile to point out the comparisons between good and bad UX, regardless of the means by which it’s being dictated.