Twitter is "simplifying" tweets by erasing third-party info from them

Twitter wants you to come home to the Mothership. In fact, they are making it much more convenient for you by removing any mention of third-party apps out of tweets.

TNW broke the story yesterday, pointing out that Twitter took third party attributions off of their mobile app last month. Embarrassingly, I had no idea after deleting the Twitter app for iOS from my phone (I discovered it doesn’t seem to recognize the “notifications = off” setting). I now favor TweetList, but you’ll never know it. In fact, you won’t know much about how a person interacts with Twitter at all.

Twitter now has a much more homogeneous look. I’m sure that was their intent.

If Twitter offers to simplify anything for you, politely decline.

Donna Tam of CNET got the following response from Twitter when she asked about the changes: ”This is part of our ongoing work to simplify Tweets and emphasize the content being shared,”

The “simplification” effort is of course part of their thinly-veiled campaign to discourage people from using third-party applications without cutting off access altogether.

When Twitter’s Ryan Sarver said that developers shouldn’t “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience,” I guess he meant that they shouldn’t have built them to begin with?

The future of TweetBot and its third-party brethren

TapBot’s TweetBot for Mac was recently discontinued (though a paid version will be reproduced) over concerns about the number of tokens that are now allowed by Twitter. In their post, they recount the challenges associated with working with Twitter’s new rules for their API. It’s a bleak prospect to build a platform that can sell less than 100K units, pay development costs, market the product, and risk being summarily discontinued by Twitter at any time,

The risk and uncertainty for developers (as well as users) is no doubt what Twitter wants.

Twitter.com just stopped displaying app names in tweets; here’s why po.st/OpYchG (Hint: Your apps are going away, dudes.)

— Jolie O’Dell (@jolieodell) August 27, 2012

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Jim Dougherty

Writer and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.com

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.