Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead

Michael Sippey of Twitter has posted another hard-to-understand-what-they-really-mean update on Twitter’s evolving stance on third-party API usage. Scroll down and look at that insipid four-quadrant matrix, where the top-right quadrant represents the stuff Twitter is discouraging. In the “good” quadrants are bullshit terms like “Social CRM”, “Social analytics”, and “Social influence ranking”. Sippey writes:

In the lower-right quadrant are services that use Twitter content for social influence ranking, such as Klout.

In the upper right-hand quadrant are services that enable users to interact with Tweets, like the Tweet curation service Storify or the Tweet discovery site Favstar.fm.

That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, “traditional” Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.

So Klout, which is utter vainglorious masturbatory nonsense, that’s OK. But services like Storify and Favstar, which are actually useful and/or fun, those are no good. And don’t even get me started on Twitter turning against client apps. For chrissake Twitter’s own app started life as a third-party client.

★ Thursday, 16 August 2012