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Tweetie was an amazing iPhone app. And part of what made it such a great Twitter app was the fact it was designed by a Twitter user. However, as others have been saying, the new Twitter iPhone app seems to be a 1:1 extension of the Twitter business model. If Tweetie was designed by a user, the new Twitter app was designed by Twitter’s senior management.
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A Few Thoughts on the New, New Twitter — Shawn Blanc
This direction has been clear for a while now, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
Their challenge is finding a way to monetize to survive. They must have huge operating costs and yes, people to pay but they have to do it without alienating existing users and to provide a good user experience. Have they done that? I don’t think so yet. But it’s easy to criticize the design while ignoring the realities, who’s proposing a better solution?
Maybe there isn’t a good solution and we as users have to compromise, leave or let Twitter eventually run itself out of business. Which is it? Does a sponsored link or two disrupt you more than frequent fail whales?
Thankfully, we still have options, there are dozens of fantastic Twitter clients for OS X & iOS, there’s even a couple decent clients on Windows. For as long as Twitter keeps their API open — not necessarily something we can count on — we can choose a best of both worlds experience. Twitter may not like it, but unlike the ethical problems of ad blocking it’s built on an ecosystem that they built and they still provide.
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