Linked List: January 16, 2023

Monday, 16 January 2023

16 Years Ago: ‘Introducing Twitterrific’ ★

I’m not sure what’s cuter: that The Iconfactory needed to explain what Twitter was, or that my @gruber account counted as “famous” on Twitter back in 2007.

What a glorious, groundbreaking app. So it goes.

Twitter’s Rummage Sale ★

Online auction where you can bid on now-unneeded office equipment, furniture, coffee machines, and so forth from Twitter. Feels like something you typically see after a company has gone bankrupt and shuttered its doors, not just downsized. This is the right amount of dignity for Twitter today, though.

Craig Hockenberry: ‘The Shit Show’ ★

Craig Hockenberry:

Like my mom, the API has been declining for awhile. Endpoints were removed, new features were unavailable to third parties, and rate limiting restricted what we could do. And like my mom, we struggled on and did the best we could, trying to stay upbeat about it all.

What bothers me about Twitterrific’s final day is that it was not dignified. There was no advance notice for its creators, customers just got a weird error, and no one is explaining what’s going on. We had no chance to thank customers who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in their ongoing shit show.

But I guess that’s what you should expect from a shitty person.

Personally, I’m done. And with a vengeance.

I read an early draft of this post, and this is the polite version.