Vlambeer did a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) and were asked about IAP. Their response:

We know IAPs are the best and everyone loves them, but we decided not to put them in the game and instead charge outrageous up-front prices because we hate gamers and love money.

I think I’m in love. (Also: buy Ridiculous Fishing—it’s fab.)

Wired today has a small article on the three things Samsung needs to overtake Apple. Writer Christina Bonnington explains that Samsung is “almost there” in overtaking Apple (admittedly in part due to its substantially larger marketing budget, which Apple could match if Tim Cook acquires a penchant for flinging shit at walls and seeing what sticks). All it needs are the following three things:

Industrial design

Complete control over the consumer experience

Brand power

Sadly, the list appears to be missing a fourth entry, which is “a sneaky copy of Apple’s roadmap, so Samsung can copy what Apple’s going to do, before Apple does it itself,” along with a fifth entry, which is “figure out how to sell it to people without accidentally forgetting that it’s no longer the 1950s”.

Sick Chirpse reports on footballer-turned-boxer Curtis Woodhouse tracking down a Twitter troll. The short of the story is some twonk on Twitter had a go at Woodhouse, and Woodhouse then asked his followers for the troll’s address. There then followed a bit of to-and-fro, with original twonk getting increasingly cagey and boxer bloke showing his grown-up, professional sportsperson demeanour with such lovely outbursts as

i cant wait!! im give him a right pasting!! [sic]

and

right Jimbob im here !!!!! someone tell me what number he lives at, or do I have to knock on every door #itsshowtime [sic]

—that second one, complete with a picture of the street where increasingly frightened twonk lived.

The episode is spreading round Twitter and the web, with people generally on the side of Woodhouse. How great, they argue, that some stupid little troll got what was coming to him. Personally, I find the entire episode despicable and chilling.

I hate Twitter trolls as much as the next person, and I’ve also experienced several runs of prank phone calls, including one lovely soul who’d ring up daily and rant down the phone about what a wanker I was and how everything I do was shit. (Presumably, they weren’t an Apple fan, nor, clearly, a fan of my writing.) But the Twitter mob mentality is worse. If someone’s making a genuine threat, make a complaint to the proper authorities; but if someone’s just being a dick, don’t form a little online posse and have a boxer drive to the troll’s house, to, in the boxer’s own words

give him a right pasting!! [sic]

Sometimes the internet is a thing of pure magic—one of those inventions that is almost as revolutionary as penicillin or the car. But this skirmish also shows that it can be an enabler of the worst of humanity, where bullies bully, and the bullied become just as bad as the aggressors, while an audience looks on, baying for the most explosive outcome. It’s not funny—it’s just sickening.

Stuart Dredge has written about the recent online row about paying journalists. The short of the story is Nate Thayer was asked to repurpose an article for The Atlantic for no money, and countless toys were rapidly thrown out of countless prams by countless writers, bloggers and people who just really like throwing toys out of prams.

Dredge is calmer than most, and argues against the commonplace default position these days that people should always be paid for writing.

My wife and I have a site called Apps Playground, about children’s apps, which is profitable (to the tune of £20-£30 of App Store affiliate fees a month, once hosting costs are deducted) as long as you don’t factor in the time we spend writing it. So we’re writing for free, but it’s our own thing.

If someone – say a big technology site like TechCrunch or Mashable – asked me to write the kind of stuff I do for The Guardian for them for free, would I? Obviously no. If they asked me to do a guest piece for free in my role as Apps Playground co-founder, with a link to the site? Obviously yes. Different hats.

On the surface, this looks similar to the regular ‘write for us in return for exposure’ offer every seasoned writer I know gets from publications on a fairly regular basis. As Dredge notes, writing for free is about the trade-off—whether or not you will potentially see more overall long-term value/income in return for giving away some of your time.

That said, this is looking at things from an individual’s viewpoint rather than a wider context. When publications—especially online—trend towards unsustainable rates (or in many cases, no rates), everyone’s individual one-off potentially leads to a situation where no-one gets paid. As someone who’s almost entirely a professional writer these days, that scares the shit out of me. Having been doing this gig for well over a decade now, with (so far) precisely no editors hunting me down and repeatedly punching me in the face while yelling about inaccurate use of interrobangs, I like to think I’m doing a pretty good job of things. But even so, it’s hard to see how it’s possible in the long term to compete against free, if that’s the way things go.

Dredge notes:

Perhaps, too, there are simply too many journalists, and new digital economics mean we’ll have to work harder and scrap smarter to stay in the game. There’s an interesting parallel with musicians here, I think, which is probably a separate article in itself.

He may well be right. Perhaps the entire creative sector is moving towards an end point where the vast majority of those within it—even those who’d previously had long and healthy careers—simply won’t be able to survive. Writing, music, and other creative endeavours could become little more than hobbyist pastimes, filling an hour in an evening before the creator goes to bed, ready for another day doing a ‘proper’ job, whatever that might be. That doesn’t so much horrify me as make me incredibly sad. If we cannot find a place and see value in creative tasks, I think we’ll be poorer for it and publications/other outlets will increasingly become unfocussed; however, perhaps with more people having a voice, diversity will flourish, great new creators will break through, and people will start once again thinking about paying directly to read, watch or hear more work from them, rather than waiting until they’ve a spare evening to craft something new.

Update: Gary Marshall adds his thoughts.

It’s no secret Twitter has a client-hostile approach. Recent terms restrict any one app to a ‘token limit’ of 100,000 users. Naturally, this limit doesn’t take into account pirated versions of paid apps or those that are abandoned by users who move on to something else. The Guardian’s written about the impact of this policy: Android app Falcon had to hike its price to stay on Google Play and Windows 8 Tweetro was pulled; elsewhere, well-regarded client Tweetbot arrived on the Mac with a $20 price-tag, solely because of Twitter’s arbitrary limits.

I’m still unsure why Twitter hasn’t banned third-party clients outright, although perhaps doing so would unleash the kind of negative PR the service wants to avoid. Better to have the clients gradually and slowly die, until the point where Twitter can proudly note that 99 per cent of people on the service are using official clients anyway, and so killing off those few clients clinging on is no big deal. The thing is, what, in the long run, will be an official Twitter client?

The latest update on the TweetDeck blog has announced that along with pulling Facebook support, the AIR, iOS and Android versions of TweetDeck have been canned. Instead, you’re encouraged to use the web app or Chrome app (which adds notifications). The post states:

We think these web and Chrome apps provide the best TweetDeck experience yet, and that they are the apps in which you’ll want to see us add new capabilities first, followed closely by our Mac and PC apps.

The inference is clear: the web is where Twitter wants you to be for TweetDeck, because it’s there where Twitter can control its client and roll out updates whenever it wishes, not restricted by the whims of users who might choose to not upgrade, or the vagaries of app stores.

But what of the standard Twitter client? Well, the TweetDeck announcement claims the web focus for TweetDeck is specific to usage for that product:

In many ways, doubling down on the TweetDeck web experience and discontinuing our app support is a reflection of where our TweetDeck power-users are going. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady trend towards people using TweetDeck on their computers and Twitter on their mobile devices.

The post also notes an “increased investment” in Twitter for mobile, most obviously with enhanced search and photo filters, but I wonder if this is a short-term solution. Twitter wants the ability to control its products and update them whenever it wants. Right now, third-party clients and the app-focussed mobile ecosystem are getting in the way. My guess is that this year will see Twitter finally pull the plug on all third-party clients, and next year will find the company pushing its web offering extremely hard. Whether users will come along for the ride is another matter.