
Twitter Reportedly Discontinuing Development of Its Mac Client - protomyth
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/09/08/mg-twitter-mac
======
bpatrianakos
I don't really understand the need for a desktop client to begin with. The
site works just fine and there's no extra software to install, just a web
browser. That said, I also think an official Twitter Mac client is redundant
now that Mountain Lion is out. The built in sharing and that thingy that
swipes out from the right of the screen and lets you Tweet work fine for
making posts then the site itself is just fine for consuming them.

I've never understood needing a desktop client for most websites really. To me
they're just a waste of space, one more app to have running, and a constant
distraction with all their alerts. My phone alerts me enough as it is. I'm on
my Mac to get stuff done most of the time. I don't know, maybe I'm just an old
fashioned 26 year old. To each their own I suppose.

Now, that last bit in the post I didn't quite get - "out of spite". Is there
some political reason that Twitter would be spiteful toward the Mac platform?
If so I don't understand why especially since Twitter is now built into iOS
and OS X. Can someone explain that please?

~~~
masklinn
> The site works just fine

For low values of fine, it takes a huge amount of resources, is pretty slow
(especially on older hardware or browsers), doesn't — as far as I know —
remember where you were in your timeline and what you have or have not read
yet (and yes, I do like seeing all the tweets of the people I'm following),
etc...

> The built in sharing and that thingy that swipes out from the right of the
> screen and lets you Tweet work fine for making posts

Except if you want to make arbitrary tweets or discuss things.

> the site itself is just fine for consuming them.

It does not.

> I've never understood needing a desktop client for most websites really.

Because there are situations and services for which a desktop client simply
works better.

> To me they're just a waste of space

Great, here's an idea, don't use them if you don't like them. Others don't
agree and will just keep using them. Deal?

~~~
bpatrianakos
Why the tone? I don't use them. I tried. I gave my opinion, asked some
questions, and my opinions were there to give context as to why I'm asking the
questions.

I know we're used to seeing everyone spout off their opinions as if their
opinions were facts but what I said was clearly an innocent opinion.

What's with everyone being on edge here? Why does everyone want to pick a
fight or be the guy that tells everyone else why they're wrong? Sheesh,
everyone complaining about HN going downhill is right (now _that_ is an
opinion said as if it were fact).

In any case, I'm actually really interested in the comment about spite Gruber
makes at the end. Can anyone answer that?

~~~
akaBruce
I'm going to start by saying I really don't know, but here are my guesses.
It's all about the way they collect data for advertising and for analytics.

For example, Twitter gives you the option to tailor itself (its ads?) based on
the websites you visit. <http://i.imgur.com/EWU2l.png> Facebook tracks you
with their Like button, I imagine Twitter is doing something similar. And
while they can track you while logged out, they would probably be better off
if they could tie that information to all the followers, followees, and
behaviors associated with an account.

My second example is embedded tweets. Although I can't find the article or
blog post, I remember seeing a while back that Twitter wanted to start pushing
people to use their embedded tweets rather than images.
<https://dev.twitter.com/docs/embedded-tweets>

Aside from providing the user with a better experience (like being able to
click on the users' names to go to their profiles) or letting Twitter control
the user experience, this also allows Twitter to embed tracking pixels.
Highlighted in this picture are the tracking pixels loaded in Chrome when I
embedded the latest tweet from the Twitter account on a web page.
<http://i.imgur.com/SeVaQ.png>

And this next example wasn't made for the web, but it plays into how they're
trying to boost their own analaytics. While wrapping every link with their
t.co url shortener does give them control over thing like killing spam links,
it also lets them track which links became popular from which tweets. That's
why they'll still use their t.co links on already short links (reminder: in my
opinion). I believe this solution works out for them because if someone clicks
a link from their official Android app or from a 3rd party app like MetroTwit,
they can still track the referral came from a tweet.

To summarize, I believe they're trying to boost their advertising relevance
and trying to improve their analytics offerings to business accounts by using
browser cookies.

~~~
bpatrianakos
So if I understand you correctly, you're saying that the spite Gruber mentions
comes from the fact that they can't track you I'm the native app. That's a
perfectly reasonable assumption but I don't think it really has much to do
with spite. I read in another comment that maybe they're getting rid of all
traces of the old guard's legacy and that seems to me more likely to be where
the spite Gruber mentions plays into this.

~~~
akaBruce
Oh, sorry. I misread "In any case, I'm actually really interested in the
comment about spite Gruber makes at the end." as "In any case, I'm actually
really interested in the comment Gruber makes at the end. Can anyone answer
that?"

So I interpreted the comment at the end as "They want people to use the
website."

------
david_shaw
Ah, man. Twitter for Mac is the only Twitter client that I really, genuinely
like -- I was hoping for a direct port to Windows one day.

I can only hope that, if true, it's to make room for Twitter for Mac 2.0,
rather than to convince people to sit there with Twitter.com open, hitting "$x
new tweets" every few minutes.

~~~
MikeKusold
Check out MetroTwit ( <http://www.metrotwit.com/> ). I stumbled across it
about two months ago and I've been using it ever since. It is a bit pricey for
premium, but I bought it anyways (before it looked like Twitter was killing
API access).

~~~
ryanmacg
Unfortunately it's Windows only which doesn't fix the issue of Twitter for Mac
being put out to pasture. It is a great twitter app if you ever use Windows
though

------
Karunamon
What the ever-loving hell is Twitter on about these past few months? It seems
almost as if they're _trying_ to piss people off.

~~~
nateberkopec
MBAs.

~~~
mehulkar
Yet I've been trained to think that the people with big degrees know best, so
I'm still counting on them making my twitter experience, and thus my life,
much much better. _fingers crossed_

------
nvk
This sucks, another web app comes out; tells the world use me & develop for
me, now f* off.

Now they are punishing everyone because they can't figure out how to make
money by magic or ads.

I'm not arguing that it is a smart move to create a company on top of someone
else's single purpose platform, but now they are going after the users.

Try charging for a change. 172 million active users x 10c a day = $516,000,000
mo, that's 3 bucks a month, yes most won't pay, but you can't really expect to
make more than 1/2 billion dollars a month with micro blogging. And you can
also charge a _fair_ fee for developers, per API usage, you could probably
double up the revenue.

With this very basic math, you don't need to cripple the user experience to
place ads customers don't want to see.

I hope app.net get’s it right, it’s unlikely but would be great. I’ve
supported it.

------
ig1
Most people I know who use a Mac desktop app for Twitter use TweetDeck (which
was acquired by Twitter last year), so it wouldn't surprise me if they're
deprecating the Mac Twitter client in order to make TweetDeck their standard
desktop client across platforms.

~~~
chimeracoder
Given that TweetDeck seems fated to be abandonware, I highly doubt it. Their
Android client became all but unusable soon after the acquisition, and I've
heard iOS was dropped completely.

TweetDeck was mostly a defensive acquisition to begin with (they had a huge
market share, and deck.ly was a perceived threat).

~~~
ig1
They abandoned mobile but not desktop, the last Mac update was about a month
ago and looking at their jobs page they're actively hiring new people to work
on it.

It would be inline with wanting to have one official client per platform.

------
moizsyed
Every service goes thru the following cycle: New ⇨ Exciting ⇨ Necessity ⇨
Annoyance ⇨ Irrelevant

Twitter skipped necessity for most people, went right to annoyance, heading
down quickly to irrelevant.

------
ChiperSoft
Twitter Mac hadn't been updated in over six months. I think it's fair to say
they discontinued development the day Loren quit the company.

~~~
masklinn
> I think it's fair to say they discontinued development the day Loren quit
> the company.

Pretty fair yes, same with the iPad client which has only seen anemic update,
and at the same time they're trying to kill third-party clients.

Unless the strategy is to burn the ship to the keel, I really don't get what
they're doing.

------
GBKS
The Mac client is what made Twitter useful for me. It has a dedicated place on
the desktop and I can peek in any time quickly to see what's new. Like a
personalized news ticker. In contrast, I can't stand using the website. So
this might reduce my usage drastically and turn me into a mobile only user.

~~~
seiji
All the cool kids are using <https://sites.google.com/site/yorufukurou/home-
en> now anyway.

~~~
porsupah
I can't really recommend the UI design, but it does work well. In particular,
its implementation of filtering (and here we hit the reason Twitter would
hardly mourn the end of third party clients) is simple and complete,
permitting me to be rid of autotweets from the likes of FourSquare and
RunKeeper.

As a consequence, I haven't used Twitter's website in months.

Ah well. If Twitter should wither, it's been an interesting ride; however, I
suspect it's reached F _c_ b __k inherent security of position.

That said, if anyone knows of a genuine (ie not a poll on a random website)
survey on people's usage of Twitter, I'd be most interested to see how the
public at large uses Twitter, and who's heard of Twitter's edging away from
third party clients.

------
j_baker
Assuming this isn't a just a rumor, this reeks of corporate politics. Loren
creates an app that gets peoples' attention. Loren leaves. Twitter for Mac
slowly dies. I don't doubt that someone has a rationalization for this, but I
have to question the motivations behind such a move. This sounds more like
someone trying to get rid of someone else's "legacy", or at a minimum some
"new guard" trying to get rid of the "old guard". The Twitter Mac App is well-
designed and popular. What good reason could twitter have for killing this?

It sounds like twitter's attempts to "reinvent" itself are going to just push
them further into irrelevance.

Of course, if this _is_ just a rumor, then you can pretty much ignore the
entirety of my rant.

~~~
gk_jam
It's pretty simple why Twitter would discontinue this app. They want to have a
consistent user experience across all their clients and they will continue to
introduce more rich content (such as Cards) from their brand partners. It's a
lot easier for them to manage this consistency of experience by sticking to
HTML5 for the client experience rather than maintaining and updating a set of
native clients each time newer content features are released.

~~~
j_baker
You know, life would be so much simpler if companies could just force their
idea of "consistent user experience" on people. Sometimes we as engineers have
to take on additional complexity and just give the fucking customer what they
want.

You can give users a rich user experience in a desktop app. Yes it will be
more complex. Will it ultimately end in a better overall user experience? It
sounds like your stance is "yes", and mine is "no".

------
Tycho
The heck? Even though it's integrated directly into the OS?

I'm hoping that the explanation is along the lines of Apple building their own
Twitter client to replace the existing one.

Twitter having its own desktop client made it exciting like a whole new
internet protocol: Usenet, the Web, IRC, email, Twitter. Having it just
residing on that terrible website demeans it.

Having said that, the iPad client is vastly superior to the desktop one
anyway. Although the select-text-and-tweet-it feature was a workflow with a
unusually profound impact on social media.

~~~
mattparcher
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Apple to build a Twitter client. They’re
simply not interested in putting in that kind of work for a third party’s
product/service, without incredibly strong incentive.

I believe the last time they did anything like this was on the iPhone, when
they built custom apps for YouTube and Google Maps—but they did that almost
out of _necessity_ for the user experience, since there were no usable
alternatives for those services. (Additionally, with the YouTube app, Apple
wanted to encourage adoption of "HTML5" H.264 video, because the majority of
video content still required Adobe Flash, unplayable on the iPhone.)

This is all besides the fact that Twitter is now strongly discouraging
clients, which apparently now includes their own…

~~~
Tycho
On the other hand, they already added the Twitter integration to the right-
click menu, and there were rumours recently that Apple were in talks to buy a
large stake of Twitter Inc.

------
oomkiller
I only use Twitter via the Mac app and their iOS apps. Use of the web
interface is painful and sluggish compared to the native apps. With them
killing off the Mac app, I don't think I'll be using Twitter any more, except
in the bathroom or in line when I'm bored (on my phone/iPad). It's even more
bothersome that there isn't a clear reason for this.

------
malandrew
I hope they open source the entire codebase. That's the best way to handle
projects you no longer want to spend money maintaining.

~~~
michaelhoffman
They don't just want to stop spending money on it. It seems like Twitter wants
people to stop using desktop apps to access Twitter.

------
uptown
I know it'd probably violate some terms and conditions, but is there any
reason a desktop-client couldn't be developed that just "consumed" the
website's content in a webview in order to present it in a more app-like
style? Kind of a real-time scraper to change how Twitter is presented to the
end-user.

------
jorgem
spite?

