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“Independent developers built the first Twitter client for Mac and the first native app for iPhone. “3rd party clients have had a notable impact on the Twitter service and the products we built,” read a 2018 memo from Rob Johnson, who was the company’s developer platform lead at the time. (Side note: it’s hard to believe that Twitter couldn’t have made alternative apps serve ads if it wanted or needed to.) At times, Twitter has seemingly recognized the value outside developers added. And, yes, people have used third-party clients to get an ad-free Twitter experience, not because they purposefully stripped out ads but because Twitter didn’t serve them through the API. The apps have also acted as safe havens from Twitter’s changes they didn’t have the flood of recommended and out-of-order tweets that the official app did, and they gave us options for using a Twitter app for Macs after the official one was discontinued for a year. Screenshot: Echofon via The Wayback Machine Echofon added the ability to mute unwanted users and hashtags in 2011, a feature the official versions didn’t get until 2014. Third-party client users, who numbered in the millions in 2018, often enjoyed features years before they came to the official app. TweetDeck, a part of The Verge’s newsroom to this day, was an independent app for years until the company bought it. It’s also not the only time Twitter acquired a popular third-party client outright. Images: Tweetie / Twitter via The Wayback Machine

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In 2015, the company also hired a developer of a different third-party client to improve its Android app. Even if you haven’t heard of Tweetie before, you may have used it in 2010, Twitter acquired it and made it the official iPhone client. A client called Tweetie is widely credited for inventing the pull-to-refresh interaction that’s become almost ubiquitous throughout iOS and Android for refreshing all sorts of feeds. Third-party apps have had a massive impact on how we use smartphone apps in general, not just Twitter. (Originally, Twitter preferred “twittering.”) Twitterific also led the way in using a bird logo. It wasn’t until at least a year later that Twitter the company started using the phrase too. Instead, it was suggested by Blaine Cook, a QA tester for The Iconfactory’s third-party client, and immediately adopted.

The idea that a “tweet” would be what we call a Twitter post didn’t actually come from the company itself, according to a blog post from Twitterific developer Craig Hockenberry. Take, for example, that word I just used - tweeting. The iPhone’s App Store wouldn’t come along until over a year later.

Ghirardi echofon how to#

Here’s a screenshot from Twitterific’s site in 2007, with the bird explaining how to install the Mac app. Twitter didn’t put a bird in its logo until 2010. They’ve also acted as a safe haven from unwanted changes, helping to keep people tweeting when they were ready to give up on the platform. As many people have pointed out over the past week, third-party clients helped make Twitter the platform it is today, innovating parts of Twitter we take for granted and, in the early days, helping form the company’s very identity. It’s a loss for all the people who used the apps and, almost certainly, a loss for Twitter itself. After Twitter cut off their API access and changed its rules to bar apps that compete with its own, The Iconfactory has announced that it’s discontinuing Twitterific, Fenix has been pulled from app stores, and Tapbots has posted a memorial for Tweetbot.

The age of great third-party Twitter clients may be over. The third-party apps Twitter just killed made the site what it is today