It helped people discover new Twitter clients by seeing what other people were posting with. I'll admit that this benefit may not have been anywhere near worth the added clutter and screen space, but it was good for something.

Exactly. I found out about new clients quite a few times because of the via stamp.

Not only that, but it helps them discover new apps. For example, 'posted via Instagram would be useful', as would 'posted via Camera+' etc.

Twitter is encouraging services to use their new Twitter Card feature for things that syndicate to Twitter like Path and Instagram. This gives the App that posted the tweet additional attribution than "via Path" or whatever...

Although the rollout is slow, it's the ultimate solution for twitter because it does provide a better experience. For those kinds of apps at least.

and it helped me to remove useless/automated tweets from timeline using a home-made greasemonkey/user script.

Totally agree ... the via tag was very useful for helping decide which automated, bot, spammer to avoid. It provided additional context for tweets.

That's your own fault for following spammy accounts.

My friends use automated apps like Instagram, Foursquare, GetGlue ...... and many more. They are not spammy.

Just like Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky”, its purpose was more to communicate something about the brand rather than to serve some useful functionality. In Google’s case, it communicates playfulness, in Twitter’s case, it was geeky openness. Clearly this is not true for Twitter anymore.

According to Twitter's own numbers, there were over a million registered apps... last year. By their own growth numbers, assuming they didn't increase (very unlikely), there would be almost 25 million registered apps today.

http://blog.twitter.com/2011/07/one-million-registered-twitt...

How many of those apps are people using T or running ThinkUp instances?

It's doubtful that many of these apps offer any functionality that could qualify them as a client.

The via stamp told you whether a tweet was posted via desktop or mobile, which can be useful to know.

It's not that we don't agree, it's that we (or, personally, I) don't see how you wouldn't know what its benefit could be. That you would think "it's about time" was worth posting at all based upon not knowing the benefits of the feature, even if those benefits only accrued to other people.

But hey, I suppose it's easier to say we don't understand your point to the degree necessary to agree with it, than it is to suspect a fundamental flaw in your own reasoning.

It certainly encouraged innovative and creative developers.

And how exactly is that?

Free publicity for their new twitter clients and tools.

In terms of social interaction it adds quite a bit. Imagine the tweet: "This party's awesome".

Seeing if it was published from Twitter for Blackberry, Tweetbot for Mac or EventualTweet tells me a lot about yourself as a person (and believe me, stuff like this makes/breaks relationships).

Are we still at the stage of judging people based on what smartphone they own? Good grief.

While I'm more on your side, it's worth noting that it's more than what smartphone, it's "are they tweeting about the party from their phone or from their laptop/PC", which I think does say something about a person, even if it's not something I'd pay any attention to.

I thought 140 characters making or breaking relations was somehow frivolous. I did not realize that those clients had a relationship weight associated with them as well.

What are we in grade school?

Yeah, it's of no interest except to nerds, who are always a minority.

Regarding the downmod, did I say something false?

Probably because you said nerd. Makes guys feel bad and all. And maybe because people here think the via is great for advertising their awesome super one of a kind twitter apps!

I personally don't like the idea of via on any service. Unless it is an automated message then in that case it should be flagged as a computer generated message.