Hi Twitter and especially hi @rsarver,
Yesterday you decided to kill Twitter. Sounds dramatic? Yes, but it is the truth! I am one of the early adaptor users who has seen many fail whales in all the years all of the time I loved Twitter for its simplicity, its openness and its reduction to the minimum.
And I loved to have many choices on how I can access Twitter. I never really liked the website but always used several different clients on all my platforms (which are Mac, Windows and the iPhone). As with me personally having different clients used in a wild mixture depending on daily mood and current needs you have many million users with many different ideas on how they want to use Twitter.
Then you started to say “one client to rule them all” and acquired Tweetie and made official clients for the iPhone and the Mac. OK, in this moment it just made the options better than before as one new client means another idea on how to use Twitter. But already than all the developers of iPhone and Mac Twitter clients got upset because of a free of charge opponent. Anyway, I bought several of them as Tweetie / Official Twitter client never matched my needs.
Now you decided to go a step ahead and want to stop those other existing and upcoming Twitter clients by changing the API rules and to simply forbid them. Sorry, but this the worst thing you could have done. Never forget who made you as big as you are today – it have been all the users using all the many clients with their many ideas on user interfaces. Even I myself started last December my own project on a Twitter client on both Windows (where no official client is available) and Mac (where an official client is available next to many, many others…). Why did I start? Because I have another idea on how people can user Twitter more efficient. Now you tell me and all the developers out there, that there is only one right idea for a user interface – yours. I am sorry but I won’t believe this is the real reason. For me it seems the main reason is you want to press money out of your user base – as we all have already seen on Twitter for iPhone (which I don’t use btw) and your bad implementation of some kind of advertisement. Don’t get me wrong – I am the last saying you should not try to make some money – but be aware that your money comes from your big number of users.
I do have active API keys for my client so could finish it on plan (public beta should have started by the end of the month) but now I am not sure if I even want to support Twitter at all. And what shall I say to the potential customers of my client? Maybe Twitter is gonna revoke my API keys if they feel lucky and it will stop working?
So STOP WITH THIS BULLSHIT and let the API open for everyone. Don’t trust on your user base to stay with you if you go ahead in this way – Twitter is a service used by first and second adaptors – they are the first to come but also can be the first to leave.
Personally I will revoke my Twitter sending integration in both my popular Windows Google Reader client as well as from my Snarl style within one week and start to port my own client over to StatusNet if you stay with those regulations. I will have a look for one week what happens and if you listen to your users – if not all of my Twitter accounts will be closed and I won’t be to sad to leave you.
Kind regards
Sven