The Mainstream Twitter Experience

Twitter just announced their recent efforts regarding consistent twitter experience to its developers.

Between all the nice words about engagement and usability, I noticed this paragraph, which according the my twitter stream – I was not the only one:

developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” …. in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

Delivering a consistent Twitter experience | Twitter Developers

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/delivering-consistent-twitter-experience

(via Instapaper)

What does this mean? Are excellent apps like TweetBot only reproducing the mainstream Twitter UX? Will Twitter block their API to such apps?

 

Twitter a taking another shot at forcing me and you to use their native apps and the Twitter website. Besides the fact that some 3rd party apps are by all means superior to the Twitter native app, why would twitter insist on it in the first place?

Some people say it’s the advertising business that they want to take a chunk of. I hope that’s wrong, as I won’t appreciate ads in my stream, and don’t see how exactly that’s going to fit their famous user experience.

No professional uses the Twitter website itself, so only relevant ads, if you believe this point, is mobile ads. A huge market that other social networks are also having a hard time with.

Anyway, this is a dangerous act by Twitter, many believe. Here’s another good post about it – Careful, Twitter — remember what happened to MySpace and Digg

What do you think Twitter are up to?
Sent from my iPad