Twitter client Kiwi deep frozen due to Ryan Sarver
Ryan Sarver (head of Twitter’s Platform Group), in March:
Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no. We need to ensure users can interact with Twitter the same way everywhere.
Mac Twitter client Kiwi’s developer, today:
I’ve stopped working on Kiwi. […] It essential that the platform you’re working on is eager for your app, eager to help you get to market, and eager for you to reap your well earned rewards.
Perhaps Twitter has a great long-term goal that involves the strategic decision of “crap on the guys that made your platform popular”, but it’s a pity so many clients and devs are taking a hit. And from what I see from Twitter itself—across Mac, iPad and iPhone, the company itself is being quite hypocritical when it comes to Sarver’s comment:
We need to ensure users can interact with Twitter the same way everywhere.
Maybe Twitter should make sure its own apps have some semblance of uniformity, then.
Perhaps Twitter forgot that many of its most famous features (@ replies, hashtags, retweets) were all created by users and implemented by 3rd party clients.
Killing off 3rd party apps isn’t just bad for the developers of those apps, it also stifles the innovation they brought to the service. The Twitter guys are smart, but the people who actually used the site daily and found all these shortcuts were the ones who made it great.