

Where did the Tweetbot for Mac Alpha go? - mattkirman
http://tapbots.com/blog/news/where-did-the-tweetbot-for-mac-alpha-go

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archgrove
Twitter are gambling that they are now powerful enough to say "No more 3rd
party clients", and thus start streaming ads down peoples throats (oh, sorry -
"Richer stories" is apparently the nuspeak). I'm not sure they're yet in a
position to dictate this, especially given how bad their own clients are
compared to some other options.

The interesting thing about Twitter compared to e.g. Facebook is that the
social graph is very weak. I (and in anecdata, many people I know) use it to
follow some "big names", and a splattering of smaller names, for broadcast
information. I occasionally send something out, but it's not a strong set of
connections. The network effect is thus minimal; migrating over to app.net
would be easy, as I'm not _that_ bothered that I have exactly the same
followers/followees. When the pain of the service outweighs it's smallish
value, I'll just jump ship.

Even more people out there are just passive followers of celebrity names.
Facebook or similar could launch a "Flitter" that did everything they wanted,
and get a mass migration pretty easily - _once_ people get annoyed enough to
start looking around. If Twitter continue on this path, that threshold will be
reached much sooner than I originally expected.

~~~
dusing
"Twitter are gambling that they are now powerful enough to say "No more 3rd
party clients"

Isn't it more: No more free data for 3rd party clients? (past a certain
amount) Companies can still buy unlimited realtime data through twitter's
monitization child DataSift. Meaning the death of free 3rd party apps. Maybe
now that they have to charge a good chunk we will get better 3rd party apps?

~~~
eridius
I haven't really looked at it, but I don't think DataSift is intended for
twitter clients to use.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Not certain about DataSift, but we used Gnip and part of the terms was you
couldn't display tweets to your users directly off the firehose. I'd imagine
DataSift has a similar restriction.

Besides that; neither give you access to private tweets or DMs, so you pretty
much have to use the API for a client of any worth.

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btipling
A possible solution might be, since they are selling the application and not
providing a service, is for users of the software to create their own
application tokens and putting them into a new settings panel. There's no loss
in sales, it does require an extra couple of steps for a user to get going but
putting something like this in the advanced section or releasing it with just
the Alpha might be very good solution.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
I imagine Twitter's reaction to a major client doing such a thing would be
less than favorable to developers (no more free API keys, if I had to guess)

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aaronbrethorst
I, for one, am very much looking forward to the eventual release of an
'AppBot' client, or whatever they end up calling it.

I may sound like a broken record, but I am incredibly disappointed in
Twitter's behavior, especially given the great disparity in the feature sets
of TweetBot and the official Twitter iOS client. (and don't get me started on
the state of Twitter clients for Android...)

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nathanhammond
The future of unofficial Twitter clients might just be fully open-source code.
Twitter can't stop every determined individual from creating their own
application if the code is out there publicly. And with Twitter possibly
cutting people off I wouldn't be surprised to see some clients become open
source as they hit their cap. The question simply becomes how high the bar
becomes for building your own personal Twitter application.

Actually, that would be a rather scary end-game for Twitter: completely losing
control of their delivery platform.

~~~
riobard
Why would 3rd party Twitter client developers want to open-source their apps?
Just to hurt Twitter at their own financial cost?

~~~
kristianc
Developers might arrive at a point where there is no financial incentive in
maintaining a 3rd party Twitter app anyway.

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thomasf1
well... what more could you do if you´d actively want to destroy the company?

\- remove yourself from google search -> check

\- annoy any 3rd party app makers -> check

\- have a unreliable service -> check

\- have little product innovation -> check

~~~
pilif
Why do your points not really matter?

\- twitter already has a huge community -> check

\- twitter is known to normal people -> check

\- integrated into traditional media -> check

\- there are no alternatives with a comparable amount of members -> check

\- All of your points don't matter for normal users -> check

What competitors are there to twitter?

\- App.net: Probably too expensive for the majority to todays twitter users

\- Google+: No good clients, too hard user discovery (no way to find users via
convenient handles), real-name focussed.

\- Facebook: Privacy Nightmare, real-name focussed, insisting on a limited
amount of mutual friendships instead of breadcasting

\- identi.ca/status.net: Would be perfect, but nobody seem to be using it

Considering all this, I would assume twitter is going to stay.

~~~
thomasf1
Yea, it actually remembers me of eBay... Awfully run, but still successful.

It pains me to watch something like that though...

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kennywinker
Site took forever to load for me. Copy-pasted the contents here:
<http://pastebin.com/wRwW6BZN>

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stevencorona
Love Tweetbot, but why can't they just register a separate application
token/secret for the alpha and change it when it goes gold?

Just because it wouldn't generate any media attention or am I missing
something?

~~~
dpearson
If they went that route, they would be limited to 100,000 users. Tapbots
likely had more users than that when the new API guidelines were announced,
which means that they can have two times their current userbase, a
(potentially) significantly higher number, if they keep the same key and
secret as for the alpha.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
So they have a "limited" beta with the first 10k new test users for each
release getting to test it (and once in, you are always in). That would give
them 10 testing updates before they hit their cap and a _lot_ of useful data.

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benatkin
The last TapBots blog post, written a week and a half ago, had the title
"Don't Panic" and characterizing the response as "fear, uncertainty, and
doubt".

I think this vindicates most of the people who raised a big stink about the
API policy changes back then.

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kalms
I'm getting really tired of this. Anybody looked into tent.io? That looks
promising!

~~~
graue
Also <http://rstat.us>, which I just found out about - not sure why it hasn't
received more attention. It seems to be like a better identi.ca that can also
automatically syndicate your Twitter posts.
[http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-03-23-announcing-
rst...](http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-03-23-announcing-rstat-us)

Edit: They're also planning to create a Twitter-compatible API, so a vendor
like Tapbots could simply change the endpoint in their code and support
rstat.us as well. <https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us/issues/562>

------
comex
There is a point where third party clients are going to have to demonstrate
that they are not required to go through Twitter to get access to it. Just as
third-party IM clients long thrived without official access (and in the face
of attempts to block them), and are now commonplace and tolerated, Twitter
clients can (probably legally) switch to an API key borrowed from Twitter and
be no worse off. Even though Twitter's actions aren't catastrophic for third
party clients yet, the fact that nobody has used this approach is putting
Twitter in a stronger position than they deserve.

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smackfu
Too bad they don't let a developer just kill an "app" and all its associated
tokens. So Tweetbot could have a "Tweetbot Mac Alpha" app and then when they
were done with the alpha, they could reclaim all those tokens.

~~~
mcdavis
While not ideal, they could register a new Twitter app for the released, for
sale version of Tweetbot. Everyone would have to reconnect to that app (just
as they originally had to do on the beta), but it should get around the issue
as the new app would have zero used tokens.

~~~
smackfu
Is that allowed? I figured all the TapBots apps were tied together somehow
within Twitter (like separate apps on the same account) and Twitter would
enforce that on new apps (since the limits would be meaningless otherwise).

~~~
abraham
A Twitter account can have a large number of apps so TapBots would jut have to
rename the old one and create a new app for the release.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
> We’ve been working with Twitter over the last few days to try to work around
> this limit for the duration of the beta but have been unable to come up with
> a solution that was acceptable to them.

That tells me that they've already tried the obvious stuff people are
suggesting in this thread and Twitter simply won't allow them.

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astrojams
Why wouldn't this site use Cloudflare or WPEngine to prevent getting
slashdoted?

~~~
timdorr
Because they're not a blogging company, they're a software company. I'm
betting they aren't too concerned with tweaking Wordpress performance as they
are with building the things that actually make them money.

