This morning Twitter’s API head Ryan Sarver posted a message to the developers mailing list, advising developers against building consumer-facing Twitter apps. What was the reason? Well, they didn’t want consumers to be “confused” by how Tweets are displayed by different clients. Also, they claimed that some clients created their own versions of suggested users and trends that were different than Twitters’.
Yet companies keep launching great clients. For instance, Tapbots just launched a new iphone app called TweetBot.
People who use third-party clients (like Tweetbot) are power users and usually have specific reasons to do so. Maybe the client has some convenience features that can’t be found in the official app. Tweetdeck, for instance, makes it really easy to group users. The official Twitter app will never get features like these.
While it’s certainly possible that some third-party clients make the experience confusing, in my opinion this is just an excuse. The real reason: Twitter wants to own all consumer clients. By controlling how all Tweets are presented to users, they’ll be able to control advertising and promotions.
Consumer clients are the best places to innovate design-wise. And, what if a brand new device comes out, who’s supposed to write a Twitter client for that?
My Twitter app, Smart Tweets, stands on a very fine line. It represents Tweets in a minimal way, which is exactly what it was designed to do.