I’ve been banging on of late about Twitter’s boneheaded thinking regarding developers. Short version: Ryan Sarver, who heads up Twitter’s platform team, tells people to stop making Twitter clients, because:

With more people joining Twitter and accessing the service in multiple ways, a consistent user experience is more crucial than ever.

Twitter then starts making life difficult for devs by screwing around with how logins work, except for in their own clients, obviously, (which Twitter claims are part of the service, so THAT’S ALL RIGHT, THEN).

Reports are now coming in from all over that Twitter has bought TweetDeck (CNet). I personally can’t stand TweetDeck, but I know a lot of people who use it, and if third-party clients were all shot in the head, TweetDeck’s death would cause the biggest uproar. Therefore, it’s going to be extremely interesting to see what Twitter does next.

Conceivably, it could kill TweetDeck, but that makes no sense. Even if the purchase was made defensively, to stop TweetDeck becoming a client for a rival service, too many Twitter users work with TweetDeck to make the app disappear. Twitter could roll the column and multi-account-post functionality into its own clients, perhaps as an ‘advanced’ option, but that doesn’t sit right with the, frankly, bare-bones nature of Twitter’s official clients.

The only sensible course of action is for Twitter to continue allowing TweetDeck to exist, but then that makes a mockery of Sarver’s statement about consistency (although as Steve Lyb has noted, Twitter’s doing perfectly well on its own in that regard). Still, given the ‘one rule for us, and another for everyone else, which largely involves PUNCHING DEVS IN THE FACE UNTIL THEY GET THE HINT AND BUGGER OFF’ mindset Twitter apparently employs these days, that last option wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Matt Gemmell’s latest slice of writing goodness, Makers and Takers:

An idea is the germ of something. Maybe it’s a painting, or a novel, or even a piece of software – but the idea without the execution is nothing. Indeed, having ideas is a natural state. Innovating is a natural occurrence. We’re faced with problems (existing, or entirely new), and we conceive of potential solutions. It’s how we deal with the world around us, and why we’ve reached this height of evolution.

But the ideas weren’t what mattered; it was the execution. The development of an idea (into a concept, or a prototype, or a finished piece of work) requires both skill and dedication. The real act of creation occurs after the idea state. Only in this act of creation can legitimacy be found. Real artists, as they say, ship.

One might argue that Gemmell’s piece is timely in wake of Lodsys being dicks and Apple smacking them down, but it’s more than that. Companies and creatives whining “we would have done that” (Hello, smartphone industry in your responses to Apple!) or “I had an idea that was vaguely related to that years ago, you bastards” (Hello, Microsoft and tablet PCs!), or, worse, “I vaguely came up with something similar, patented it, sat back and waited” (Hello, Lodsys! Lodsys? Can you hear me? Oh, your head is stuck in a gin bottle). And it happens more and more these days.

Gemmell is right. Shit or get off the pot. If you’ve an idea: run with it. Do something. Be fucking creative. Don’t hold back creativity. And certainly don’t just sit there or hide your great idea in a lawyer’s pants, until such a time that someone implements something similar and then try to sue them.

It seems Apple has come to the aid of developers after all regarding the threats from Lodsys that Lodsys later attempted to defend (my rebuttal rapidly becoming the most-read thing Revert to Saved has ever run). A number of developers have now received documentation from Apple, including a letter to Mark Small, CEO of Lodsys. The short of it is summed up in the opening paragraph:

There is no basis for Lodsys’ infringement allegations against Apple’s App Makers. Apple intends to share this letter and the information set out herein with its App Makers and is fully prepared to defend Apple’s license rights.

Game, set and match, surely.

Actually, it’s a bit less tennis and rather more like a boxing match. The letter reads like Apple legal striding into the ring, landing hooks, uppercuts and other assorted punches squarely on Small’s face, until all that remains is a sad figure on the mat, wondering why he’d earlier tried picking on the little guys.

Apple believes Lodsys is talking crap in general, stating that it believes the Lodsys letters are

based on a fundamental misapprehension regarding Apple’s license and the way Apple’s products work

adding that the information provided should be

sufficient for [Lodsys] to withdraw [its] outstanding threats to the App Makers and cease and desist from any further threats to Apple’s customers and partners.

This information includes the key argument that under its license for the patents in the Lodsys portfolio, Apple is

entitled to offer these licensed products and services to its customers and business partners, who, in turn, have the right to use them. […]

Thus, the technology that is targeted in your notice letters is technology that Apple is expressly licensed under the Lodsys patents to offer to Apple’s App Makers. These licensed products and services enable Apple’s App Makers to communicate with end users through use of Apple’s own licensed hardware, software, APIs, memory, servers, and interfaces, including Apple’s App Store. Because Apple is licensed under Lodsys’ patents to offer such technology to its App Makers, the App Makers are entitled to use this technology free from any infringement claim by Lodsys.

So, again, as with Apple’s Q&A on location data, Apple didn’t immediately calm fears, but it’s done the right thing after properly considering its position. Apple believes the law is on its side, is now clearly defending its developers, and the curt language of its communication is very much in the ‘don’t mess with us’ space; here’s hoping this keeps other trolls from peering out from under their bridges.

Update: Macworld now has the full text of the letter up, because their staff writer can type faster than I can, and it’s earlier in the day on the west coast of the US, so they’re probably all full of coffee, sunshine and bagels.

Learning precisely nothing from RIM co-CEOs shouting their mouths off at every opportunity, The Telegraph reports HP’s European head Eric Cador in bullish mood:

In the PC world, with fewer ways of differentiating HP’s products from our competitors, we became number one; in the tablet world we’re going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus.

Ben Brooks asks:

Plus what? Plus crap? Plus B.S.? Plus stickers?

Probably plus [SUB: INSERT RANDOM NUMBER HERE], thereby making it have a bigger number than the iPad regarding its position, because PC guys know that bigger numbers are better, right?

As reported on this site last week, Twitter continues to dick around developers, under the guise of consistency. They want third-party clients gone, because, according to Ryan Sarver, who heads up Twitter’s platform team:

With more people joining Twitter and accessing the service in multiple ways, a consistent user experience is more crucial than ever.

Cunningly, rather than just block API access, Twitter’s instead making the user experience for third-party clients increasingly shit. This time, they’re blocking access to DMs unless a client enables you to brave the hideous OAuth sign-in that current Twitter-for-Mac and iOS dev Loren Brichter happily rubbished a couple of years ago. (In case you’re wondering, no, OAuth hasn’t gotten any better since.)

Steve Lyb decided to put the consistency claim to the test, checking out the Mac, iPhone and iPad clients, to see just how similar they all are. (Spoiler: they aren’t.) Lyb also pre-empts anyone bleating that of course the apps aren’t going to be the same, because they’re running on different systems (computer, tablet, smartphone):

It is unacceptable, despite this, to account for the discrepancies when it comes to features and functionality. Design is one thing, obviously: there are some choices to be made based on the type of device being used. You can’t make Twitter for iPhone look entirely like the Mac and iPad versions, but that’s no excuse for the amount of visual inconsistencies found between versions.

What you can do is make them act the same before making yourselves out to look like complete hypocritical fools to the people who turned your platform from nothing into something substantial, and great.

Frankly, I’m not sure Twitter cares any more, and, increasingly, neither will its users. When Favoured Client A starts playing up, they’ll move to the official Twitter one, even if it isn’t as good—and most won’t go back, because something that works is better than something that’s broken. But web users are fickle, and Twitter doesn’t do anything really special. With Facebook embracing devs, it’d only take that service to sort out its crap feeds and to encourage a few enterprising developers to make stripped-down feed-oriented clients to wipe Twitter off the face of the earth.