Twitter Removes “via {client}” Attribution in #newTwitter. Buh-Bye Developers
cristinajcordova.com
cristinajcordova.com
It's quite prominently displayed in the details pane: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seldo/5021847660/
And even more so on the tweet's individual page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seldo/5021848326/
It's absolutely still there. It just moved a little bit. Non-story.
The application attribution was always of interest to a minority of users. I think it makes a lot of sense to move it to the details pane, to keep the stream simple and give greater prominence to, e.g., the favorite link, which is much bigger in the new layout.
I think anyone developing heavily for one platform should always keep in mind that you'll need to pivot as quickly as the platform company.
I thought most users view tweets not through the twitter stream on the web but using clients. The clients may or may not show the posting app's attribution, so I don't see this as a major shift of the status quo.
Also the mobile web version doesn't have this attribution either: http://mobile.twitter.com/
There are many reasons to log into twitter.com, and so the graph needs to break out (or at least explicitely state) how many people read tweets on twitter.com.
Another, more important, point: there is probably a long tail effect here. I have a hunch that when you aggregate all reading via API vs reading via the web, the breakdown would show a huge API to web ratio.
A couple of weeks ago they released a graph suggesting that 78% of all users use twitter.com (http://blog.twitter.com/2010/09/evolving-ecosystem.html)
If you look carefully, they explain that this 78% is the percentage of people that have logged into twitter.com at least once in the last 30 days. Unfortunately this is not very useful since there are a multiple things that can only be done on twitter.com and not in 3rd party clients, either because the functionality is missing from the API or is broken (they started to fix some of these though). So even if people use a 3rd party client most of the time, they would still log into twitter.com every once in a while and thus will be counted as a twitter.com user.
A more useful statistics would be the percentage of users who use any given client as their main way of interacting with Twitter. Of course twitter.com would still be the biggest client, but not with 78% of all users, more likely somewhere between 40-50% (based on stats by twittersource.info, tdash.org and stats of Hungarian users I've collected).
As for the original post, we're running a web-based client and twitter.com is one of the most important referers so I'll have to agree that removing the "via client" attribution will hurt developers in a big way. (Yeah, I know, they are not removing it just making it a lot less prominent)
Back in the olden days of Basic Auth, you would email one of the API devs at Twitter and get a special source token to put in your code for client attribution. Then, Twitter said you couldn't get a source token any more and had to use OAuth to specify your client source. This was one of the main carrots they dangled in front of developers to get them to switch to OAuth before the Basic Auth shut off; "Use OAuth so that your client source will show on the website."
It would be one thing if it felt like a snub, but now it feels like a bait and switch.
Disclosure: I've written several twitter apps and worked on the Twitter API team as a contractor for a bit last year.
Do you think? I'd have expected most people came to twitter.com and after some time (and possibly frustration) learnt of other ways to access the main features (ie 3rd party apps).
No, you either don't spend enough time with these 'normal' people or you are simply too biased.
As someone in University right now watching his 'normal' friends and colleagues join Twitter, and even just other 'normal' people in general -- very few to none use a Twitter client, they all use the Web. The one exception that I've seen some use are Blackberry people and ÜberTwitter.
I think one reason geeks like us use clients is to have a constant flow and connection of updates coming from Twitter. 'Normal' people on the other hand use it in a more 'get-in-and-out' sense, they get on and post what they're doing, read what the last few things their friends wrote and then get back on to Facebook or whatever.
(Outlook and IM all week at work is bad enough, thanks.)
I can understand how developers might not be happy about it but I think Twitter would be ill-advised to eschew sensible changes for the users because of what amounts to politics.
Imagine a twitter engineer working on the redesign was looking at data from the homepage, looking for something to remove.
It turns out that the least clicked on thing on the entire page is the client attribution.
He looks at eye-tracking data too, and it turns out the only people who look at the client names, are developers!
The engineer opens his iPhone's calculator, and finds that by removing attribution he is reducing dynamic stream content by 33% (tweet, time, attribution) for 100M+ users.
What kind of engineer is not going to jump on this? Especially for a piece nobody except developers is going to complain about losing?
A cleaner, faster homepage is better for users. Sorry developers, the world does not revolve around you.
When I'm not using the web interface, I use it through an irc proxy. No pictures, no attribution... nothing but content.
(On my phone, I use Twidroid, but it's so buggy that all tweets attributed to Twidroid from me are usually, "it botched my priceless photo again". Not exactly the advertising they want, I bet...)
Going from attributing every tweet in the main feed and promoting outside clients freely on the sidebar of everyone's account to shunting attributions into a secondary info pane, that's a very large shift.
if this was in fact removed intentionally, i can't help but think that this was a conscious decision to make twitter a much more central (at the peril of third parties) experience (much like the overall bigger picture of #newtwitter).
that all said... they did add gist support which is so awesome. i can't take sides on this one.
Why really should Twitter care? Do they have any obligation to developers? No. Correct me if I'm wrong but legally what's stopping Twitter from shutting off its API and creating its own client?
Twitterific is Twitter for iPhone and iPads biggest competitor, so I see why, but it still is kinda evil.
I'm assuming that removing the "via client" attribution was not intentional
While it may have been interesting to see, I think there is a perfectly reasonable argument to be made for simplifying an interface and removing as much noise as is possible (especially as they've added so much information/noise to the new interface).