I deleted my twitter account a while ago but this is a new level of forgetting history. If I remember correctly Twitterrific/Iconfactory were the first folks to actually use the verb 'tweet', and absolutely provided the first iteration of the interface to twitter that we all expect today. It took acquiring Tweetie, which literally invented 'pull to refresh', before they had their own native app 3 years after Twitterrific had been released.
Twitter's success is directly attributable to a fantastic native app ecosystem on mobile platforms. If there's a lesson to be learned here, I guess it's "don't make apps for platforms you don't control because they'll drop you like it's hot the moment investors want an exit"...
As an aside, Tweetie/Twitter for iPad's column based interface was one of the absolute best interfaces I'd ever seen and used on a tablet, and one I have yet to see reimplemented in a use-friendly way to this day.
You're absolutely correct re: the history. Twitterrific not only came up with the word "tweet," they were the first one with a blue bird logo!
Twitter basically encouraged a third-party ecosystem to blossom, then decided that rather than finding ways to monetize that ecosystem, they should start slowly strangling it to death. I can't imagine that this is happening because investors are insisting on it; yes, they want a positive return on their investment, but who's really saying, "If only you guys knife Tweetbot, the stock price will double!"? There's a very small minority of users who use third-party clients, but those users are disproportionately the highly engaged "super tweeters," if you will. Is supporting them -- ideally better than they do now -- really so expensive that it's easier to just kill them? And if the answer is yes, is it really better to keep pretending that you're not doing that, and instead just make the experience of third-party developers and dedicated Twitter users steadily worse over time?
They faced the prospect of aggregation of the clients via takeovers, this would have allowed the owner of the majority of the clients to change out the platform. I had a conversation with a private equity guy in 2009 who wanted to do this, what stopped them was the idea that twitter would ratelimit and control the interface. So there was a pretty rational fear driving Twitter to do this.
The thing I was talking about was that around the time of Twitter's IPO (I don't remember the exact timeline) Twitter announced changes and limitations to 3rd party clients, including a 100k user maximum via a hard token limit[0].
Investors didn't say "knife the indies" but they certainly said "monetize, monetize, monetize" and Twitter decided the way to "monetize" was to force users into channels that had ads.
Sure, nobody ever told Twitter to go after Tweetbot, but it's not like anybody on the board said "wait a minute..." when this was the direction they announced in 2012. I'm lamenting the tail end of a strategy that started 6 years ago.
Twitter's success is directly attributable to a fantastic native app ecosystem on mobile platforms. If there's a lesson to be learned here, I guess it's "don't make apps for platforms you don't control because they'll drop you like it's hot the moment investors want an exit"...
As an aside, Tweetie/Twitter for iPad's column based interface was one of the absolute best interfaces I'd ever seen and used on a tablet, and one I have yet to see reimplemented in a use-friendly way to this day.