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Dear Twitter

Today you finally released a more or less clear statement what you think about clients having own ideas on how to present Tweets to the user. The short version: every client has to look and feel as Twitter thinks how it is the only right way.

I have read many statements which call this decision something like bullshit or similar and I am personally not amused how Twitter handles us developers. Many blog posts state that Twitter won’t be as big and feature rich if us developers and users wouldn’t have invented things like Mentions or Retweets – and this is just the trues. But Twitter seems to have lost its original user base right now and is focusing on the celebrity and events stuff they do spam me about in their newsletter quite some time already.

For me Twitter’s homepage is not (and never has been!) a good and useful way to access tweets. From day one I have been using clients (first on Mac, then iPhone and nowadays also on Windows (you might guess it – Nymphicus in my case)). If Twitter is going further in this direction they might be going there without me!

Enough complaints – what about Nymphicus!?

Nymphicus for Mac is relatively save – the now Display Requirements (formerly Display Guidelines) will be easy to implement while you might discuss if it makes sense to require to have the posting date on top right instead of bottom of the tweet…

There is one point I can’t believe that they they do require it now – it’s “Individuel Tweets -> Tweet Actions -> b”. It reads as follows:

No other social or 3rd party actions may be attached to a Tweet.

While I can understand Twitter (not the user!) may have an interest to ensure they are not send to Facebook, LinkedIn and so on this statement as written there also excludes services like Pocket, Instapaper or delicious. And this is – I have to say it also – bullshit! For my personal way of use sending Tweets and links iTweeits to Pocket is essential. If we have to remove this feature from Nymphicus (and this how it looks like) we’ll have a major feature less…

Nymphicus for Windows has the same issues as the Mac version but also adds another huge one as it is multiple protocol already. This time it is “Timeline -> Time integrity”. This one reads as follows:

Tweets that are grouped together into a timeline should not be rendered with non-Twitter content. e.g. comments, updates from other networks

This is against the main and central feature of Nymphicus – the Views. In my daily use I do have many Views mixed out of Twitter, Facebook, QUOTE.fm and Google Reader (and I did plan to add LinkedIn and Xing) which is awesome. Now I have to remove the other services (which I won’t do!) or have to cripple Views that they can only be pure Twitter or pure Non-Twitter. So in future I will have to use at least two Views where today one is enough for me. Thank you Twitter…!

I don’t want to speak about stopping work on Nymphicus as of today but once again Twitter makes me very upset on how they think they can play with us users (remember: Nymphicus has been created in my personal need for a Twitter access in a way I need it).

Yours

Sven