from Hacker News

Where did the Tweetbot for Mac Alpha go?

by mattkirman on 8/27/12, 7:40 PM with 47 comments

• by archgrove on 8/27/12, 8:03 PM

  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.

• by btipling on 8/27/12, 8:21 PM

  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.

• by aaronbrethorst on 8/27/12, 7:58 PM

  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...)

• by nathanhammond on 8/27/12, 9:57 PM

  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.

• by thomasf1 on 8/28/12, 12:50 AM

  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

• by kennywinker on 8/27/12, 8:06 PM

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

• by stevencorona on 8/27/12, 8:15 PM

  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?

• by benatkin on 8/28/12, 4:44 AM

  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.

• by kalms on 8/27/12, 8:20 PM

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

• by comex on 8/28/12, 4:18 AM

  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.

• by smackfu on 8/27/12, 8:02 PM

  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.

• by astrojams on 8/27/12, 8:30 PM

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