Yesterday, Twitter implemented significant changes to its APIs. As a result, accessing Twitter through third-party apps like Twitterrific and (my favorite) Tweetbot is now much worse. For example, one of my favorite Tweetbot features was its “Activity” tab, which gave me information about how people were interacting with me in Twitter. Now, it’s gone.
For me, this is not a trivial change. Twitter is my primary social network; I spend lots of time there. Or rather, I should say I spent time there. The change is making me rethink how much of my attention I apportion to this place. You see, it turns out I don’t like being in Twitter as much as I like being in Tweetbot. There are several reasons why.
To begin with, Tweetbot has native apps for both operating systems I use day-to-day (macOS and iOS.) These apps are coherent (if not 100% consistent) between both platforms: I can easily move between one and the other. Twitter, on the other hand, has an iOS app but discontinued its first-party macOS app earlier this year. So accessing Twitter on the Mac means either using the twitter.com website or through a third-party app like Tweetbot.
The timeline — the main component of the Twitter experience — is also significantly different between Tweetbot and Twitter. Whereas the former presents a simple chronological list of items, the latter scrambles the order of tweets based on what it deems to be interesting to me. Parsing out what I’m looking at (and why) is more work than I want to put into it.
Another major difference between the two is that Tweetbot doesn’t show “promoted” tweets. (Read: ads.) That means that the posts I see are the ones I signed up for by following particular accounts, not ones that paid for the privilege of being brought to my attention. (I suspect that herein lies the primary driver behind the change to Twitter’s API; ads is how the company makes money.)
The bottom line: Twitter is a lot less compelling to me today than it was two days ago. I will probably be spending less time there. But where was it that I was spending my time? Am I a Twitter user or a Tweetbot user? While the two share a lot in common, they’re different information environments. While the underlying information is the same, the experience of the environments is very different. I like being in Tweetbot, less so being in Twitter.
And let’s look at this from Twitter’s perspective: the company will probably notice that I’m spending less time there, but will this affect their revenue? After all, I didn’t see many ads while accessing their system through a third-party client. So I understand why they’d want alternate-reality versions of Twitter — like the one Tweetbot offered — to go away in the near-term. But what does this mean for them in the long term, if it costs them loyal users like me?