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Twitter Discards Client UI Community 127

Posted by Soulskill from the pack-your-junk dept.
Antique Geekmeister writes "Twitter has just decided to discard the community of developers who've created interesting and innovative UI applications. The announcement shows that they intend to switch from the 'bazaar' model of development to the 'cathedral,' with much tighter control of user interfaces for 'security' and 'consistency.'"
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Twitter Discards Client UI Community More

Twitter Discards Client UI Community

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  • Wait, Twitter has a community? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 12, 2011 @07:19PM (#35467260)

    I'm pretty sure that there's no real value to Twitter, so why would it have a community?

    • There's no real value to the [select * political_party where political_party='p0wned by corporations' or elected >=1960].. That hasn't stopped people voting for them.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by rilian4 ( 591569 )

        There's no real value to the [select * political_party where political_party='p0wned by corporations' or elected >=1960].. That hasn't stopped people voting for them.

        So essentially you're saying there is no value to any political party whatsoever as 100% of them fit your query. Voting is our right and our duty therefore we must vote for someone. Whom would you possibly vote for using your theory that *all* political parties have no value?

        • Not completely true! There are one or two corrupt military juntas that have been in power since before 1960. They're pretty vauable.

        • There's no real value to the [select * political_party where political_party='p0wned by corporations' or elected >=1960].. That hasn't stopped people voting for them.

          So essentially you're saying there is no value to any political party whatsoever as 100% of them fit your query. Voting is our right and our duty therefore we must vote for someone. Whom would you possibly vote for using your theory that *all* political parties have no value?

          I'm sure you can find at least one political party that has never been in power (never mind the "since 1960" part), and hasn't had a chance to get its nose into the trough ...

        • Somebody who isn't a member of a political party?

        • Voting is our right and our duty therefore we must vote for someone

          That's amusing

        • Re:Wait, Twitter has a community? (Score:4, Informative)

          by feepness ( 543479 ) on Sunday March 13, 2011 @12:09AM (#35468692)

          Voting is our right and our duty therefore we must vote for someone.

          Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They're nothing but hideous space reptiles. [unmasks them]
          [audience gasps in terror]
          Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us.
          [murmurs]
          Man1: He's right, this is a two-party system.
          Man2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate.
          Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.

        • You could try voting for a candidate based on their individual merits, rather than the party platform they represent. Moreover, you could attempt to hold that candidate to their non-party specific promises and encourage them to break with whatever party they associate with (if they do at all) whenever it runs counter to yours/the community's interests.

          There's no party worth voting for, but that doesn't mean there aren't candidates worth voting for.

      • If you think political corruption has gotten worse since 1960, it's your knowledge of history that is really killing you. Corruption was far worse before 1960, it's gotten a lot better, perhaps mainly because it's easier for people to observe what's happening. Look at the teapot dome scandal, Tammany hall in New York, the corrupt politics of Chicago, the Owens Valley thing, etc. Look what happened during president Grant's tenure. It was really bad way back then. If we survived that, then we can survive the
        • The wall-street and bank bail-outs are the biggest heist of all time. It's the first time that someone has managed to pull off a global-scale heist - and get paid for continuing to steal.

          None of those scandals sent the world into the deepest recession since the great depression. None of them threaten to bankrupt 46 of 50 states. None of them created derivatives that are worth multiples of the total global economy, that we have to back out of slowly, all the time guaranteeing any defaults for fear the wh

          • If you think it was the banks that caused 46 of 50 states to come close to bankruptcy, your knowledge of current events is as bad as your history. That was primarily a function of elected representatives doing their job: increasing spending on projects, while cutting taxes. It's exactly what the people they represented wanted them to do.

        • The main difference is that corruption today is accepted political practice, called PAC or "campaign financing."

        • the corrupt politics of Chicago

          You're not actually suggesting that Chicago has improved over the years, are you?

          To borrow from Dragnet... the names have been changed...

          ... not to protect the innocent but simply because one family eventually becomes stronger and power shifts

          • Well, it seems the police, as one example, are not as corrupt as they used to be. They used to just keep all the stuff they confiscated, get paid off by the mob, etc. Illinois does go to the limits in the corruption category, though.

      • *cough* *cough*

        UPDATE political_party p, political_party_owner o
        SET p.value = 0
        WHERE o.political_party = p.id
        AND o.type = :corporations
        AND p.id IN (SELECT e.political_party FROM election WHERE election_date >= '1960-01-01')

    • Twitter has value, but to it's shareholders and those who would purchase it's user list and access to those users.

      I would bet that the reasoning for this is to make sure everybody gets to see the dickbar in a consistent way: front and center.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      Twits are attracted to it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jo42 ( 227475 )

      Wait, Twitter has a community?

      I believe it is called the 'Twitterverse'.

      Personally I prefer 'Twatterverse'.

    • I'm pretty sure that there's no real value to Twitter, so why would it have a community?

      The vast majority of what's found on Twitter is certainly pointless - but it is now considered THE place to find breaking news when it comes to professional baseball at least (and perhaps other sports as well; but baseball is the only one I follow closely_.

    • The value of Twitter depends on who you follow. Saying Twitter is valueless because some people post valueless junk all the time, is rather like saying blogs are valueless because of the existence of blogs dominated by "hat my cat did" type posts, or that newspapers are valueless because of the existence of The National Enquirer, The Sun, etc.

      You also need to skim past the stuf that does not interest you. That is why the 140 character limit matters.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Snaller ( 147050 )

      No, you are just and idiot - it has huge value.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Trillan ( 597339 )

      That's pretty ignorant. Having ready access to the insight of others like me on Twitter has saved me countless hours with specific technical problems, has guided me towards or away from specific paths months in advance, and even gave me something to do when I was stuck in a hospital without visitors (due to other family medical problems, in children).

  • And while you're at it, support more than 140 chars, or allow compression, or something.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by davester666 ( 731373 )

      It already supports compression. Common methods of compression include: removal of vowels, homonyms [like 'ur' instead of 'your'], etc...

      • It already supports compression. Common methods of compression include: removal of vowels, homonyms [like 'ur' instead of 'your'], etc...

        LOL! RO^HFL!

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          It already supports compression. Common methods of compression include: removal of vowels, homonyms [like 'ur' instead of 'your'], etc...

          LOL! RO^HFL!

          So... after the backspace, you're not rolling ON the floor laughing, you're just rolling the floor itself while laughing? What is this, Bozo the Clown's Interior Decoration and Home Renovation?

    • Supporting more than 140 characters would break SMS support.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Threni ( 635302 )

        Who cares? That's like sticking with upper case because to change would break Apple ][ support. Most Twitter users (twats?) don't use it via SMS anyway.

        • Enforced terseness in messages is the only reason I (sometimes) follow Twitter vs pretty much never paying attention to most other social networks.

          If Twitter took away the shortness they would be consumed under the flood of other social apps.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

            • I summarized your post in less than 140 characters but according to you there is nothing worth saying in it.

              I have it completely vice versa: I don't simply see anything worth saying that can be said in only 140 letters unless it's a link which i could go to directly.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by lee1 ( 219161 )
            But the messages are rarely terse - merely brief.
      • So send 2 SMSs instead of one. Big deal.

      • My provider supports 160 characters. Twitter is already not conforming to the SMS standard I've been using for years.

        • So where do you suggest they put the username in the SMS message? (Psst, that's what the extra 20 characters is reserved for)

    • There are numerous tweet-lengthening services like TwitLonger or Deck.ly that have a URL to the full posting

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by WWWWolf ( 2428 )

      And while you're at it, support more than 140 chars, or allow compression, or something.

      Already done. [status.net]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Trillan ( 597339 )

      Short messages are Twitter's killer feature, really. It make people limit their updates to a single, concise thought. It's the reason I can scan tweets.

      Now, I'm not saying they have to be 140 characters. Maybe 200 would have the same effect. But I'm sure when you say "support more than 140" you're really meaning "support arbitrary length," right?

  • Twitter's End Game (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dagamer34 ( 1012833 ) on Saturday March 12, 2011 @07:25PM (#35467296)
    What this really means is that Twitter doesn't want users to have clients that outright refuse to display Promoted Tweets or things like the #dickbar. Seems they are all about the money now...

    • Re:Twitter's End Game (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Saturday March 12, 2011 @07:33PM (#35467326) Homepage

      Considering how much money they've made up until this point, that's hardly surprising.

    • Seems they are all about the money now...

      ... because they were not until now?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rgbscan ( 321794 )

      I hate the #dickbar so much. Man it sucked. I paid for a new client just to get rid of it!

    • The latest revision of the official Twitter iPhone app (the app formerly known as Tweetie) has location service on whenever it is in the foreground. There is no way to turn it off. There is nothing to indicate what it is doing with your location info. This coming so close to the deprecation of 3rd party apps is a really, really bad sign for where this company is going.

      I will never use their iPhone app again because of this. The #dickbar is merely annoying, recording your location without consent is actively

  • Applefied (Score:1, Insightful)

    by drb226 ( 1938360 )
    This strange and sometimes lucrative process is known as "Applefication".

  • Did they really think this through? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Saturday March 12, 2011 @07:27PM (#35467304) Journal

    The client variety for all tastes is what seems to have in part made Twitter so big.

    It has unusually diverse clients, and has become a strong platform. And now they throw the "platform" part out to just make it a grey, boring old school software application with no reach for varying interests and usage scenarios in their community?

    OK, well... It's their choice of course. But good job in trying to keep the extremely high popularity up. That's all I can say...

    I think they'll need our best wishes.

    Twitter was where many companies work their butts off to be. A company with their own client, but also a rich ecosystem of clients. Apparently, some don't like that, and *willingly* deconstruct their achievements.

    • A company with their own client, but also a rich ecosystem of clients [...that...] has become a strong platform

      Are we talking about the same Twitter, a somewhat overhyped but essentially pretty basic and straightforward distribution service for short textual messages?

      And while there may be a large number of Twitter clients out there, I'm not convinced that this constitutes a "rich ecosystem", which would imply interdependent software and services building upon Twitter to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

      Twitter was where many companies work their butts off to be. [..] Apparently, some don't like that, and *willingly* deconstruct their achievements.

      Most companies work their butts off to make money. Perhaps Twitter think they'll make more mon

    • RTFAing reveals that 90% of regular Twitterers actually use the official applications. So while they'd lose the geek vote (worse than they already have), you're unfortunately almost completely wrong.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by emag ( 4640 )

        That's what Twitter themselves say. Looking at the clients listed in my tweet stream, I'd say it's closer to 10%...

        • That may be sampling bias, though. I imagine that Twitter's just reading off statistics, and wouldn't do this if they thought it would be a significant hit to their business!

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by snookums ( 48954 )

            That may be sampling bias, though. I imagine that Twitter's just reading off statistics, and wouldn't do this if they thought it would be a significant hit to their business!

            It's almost certainly sampling bias, but it's bias towards real people who actually use the system to communicate with other real people.

            I know some self-styled "social media optimizer" consultants who will promise you thousands of twitter followers in hours. It's just a botnet of twitter accounts, all following each other and re-tweeting random garbage. In other words, the official client and the website might account for a large proportion of the volume, but it's quite possible that 3rd-party clients acco

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rich0 ( 548339 )

        Depends on how you look at it. If the Geeks are creating innovative value for the platform they might just end up leading the way someplace else...

    • This as certainly put a chill on Twitter for me.
    • They aren't "discarding" the community, rather they intend to more strongly enforce their TOS so things like twitter terminology stays at parity across all twitter apps.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Snaller ( 147050 )

      Yes, its amazing those idiots don't get that.

      It was bad enough when they changed the retweet to their new stupid way of displaying it (showing the avatar of the one getting retweeted rather than the one doing the retweeting), now this "consistent experience" is another word for bad interface.

      But hey, there is greed i them there hills. Now they are trying to make or break it. I'm betting on breaking it - unless google buys them and keeps it free to harvest the thoughts of men.

  • That isn't what they said. (Score:5, Informative)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Saturday March 12, 2011 @07:29PM (#35467314) Homepage Journal

    "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. "
    Sound like they are just setting some standards.

    • While Twitter was both vague and threatening in this missive (really, wtf?), I'm also picking up a definite theme of them wanting to shut down client apps that are primarily used by spammers. I've noted a short list of apps/sites that generate follows that are virtually always spam -- to the point where I want to auto-block any follow that occurs via those apps.

    • by "high bar" do they mean #dickbar?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nimey ( 114278 )

      But passing that on won't guarantee page hits from outraged nerds.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zadaz ( 950521 )

      Figures, a company tries to have some standards and /.ers go crazy against it.

  • FTA:

    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.

    Seems to me that's saying that client

    • No. That means that the ones who does not implement their revenue stream (aka dickbar) won't have candy.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Go read the actual guidelines, at http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms. There's a lot to be concerned about. For example, they also forbid any clients that monitor or benchmark Twitter performance, and the software actual "security and interface guidelines" are not stated. Also, for example, they've reserved the right to block or refuse clients that support multiple broadcast technologies.

  • So anything except the official clients and some selected 3rd party clients will be banned?
    Meh.

  • Doesn't that comment belong in the TSA thread?

  • I wonder how this affects the twitter client built into and available out-of-the-box within Ubuntu.

  • Last time we heard of the Star Wars Emperor, he was thrown into a giant pit int the death star. Evidently he lived through that and runs application development at Twitter. Everyone was recently complaining about the dickbar? How about the dickedapp? Since Tweetie sold out, the app completely and totally sucks. If Twitter thinks they are going to force me to use that steaming pile, I will just leave Twitter. Twitter, quit the Evil Empire crap. Run the service and stfu!

  • Says Sarver:

    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.

    So clearly one of their fears, perhaps for legal reasons, is getting their functions and widgets confused with, say, Facebook's. We all know how often YouTube and Facebook get mentioned in the same breath as Twitter (heed the great prophet Conan) but they are very much separate compani

  • Ah Twitter. Once seemed so promising, now in decline as they try to jam sponsored tweets (i.e. spam) in front of their users eyeballs.

    Nighty night.

  • I have nothing to share except this offtopic joke (Score:3)

    by zill ( 1690130 ) on Saturday March 12, 2011 @09:30PM (#35468016)

    The announcement shows that they intend to switch from the 'bazaar' model of development to the 'cathedral,'

    Software and cathedrals are much the same – first we build them, then we pray.

    • You missed out the multiple major collapses that many cathedrals (and software projects) suffered during construction, the fact that many cathedrals (and software projects) are in a state of near-continuous reconstruction in line with changing fashions in woad-rubbing (OK, that may not be the case in countries that only have a few centuries of cathedral building ; but the time for re-design will come).

      Oh, in the early periods when the foundations of many software projects (and cathedrals) were laid down, t

  • While I'm sure that the major motivations for this move goes around Twitter wanting to spam users with "promoted tweets" and such, as suggested by several other commenters above, I wonder to what degree they also feel threatened by the fact that their "new Twitter" web UI sucks so badly that many users don't want it. I tried the new UI for a little while, and found it confusing, waaay too busy, inconsistent and just generally horrible, and flipped back to the old UI.

    Despite Twitter repeated entreaties to "u

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