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Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

I wonder whether fear of a Twitter crackdown on third-party clients played any role in the timing of this. Having an app, even an alpha app, in users' hands would increase the outcry if Twitter were to move against third-party clients like Tweetbot. (Obviously, I mean an outcry in addition to the userbase for the polished iOS client.)

This is purely speculative, I admit.

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I will say this: I consider myself to be a Tweetbot user, not necessarily a Twitter user. If Twitter cuts Tweetbot off, and Tweetbot integrates with some other Twitter-like service, I will go there. Of course, this is exactly the scenario Twitter fears, but I with this increasing saber-rattling over cracking down on third-party clients I wonder if Twitter is going to cause the thing that they're trying to prevent.

But isn't twitter all about following other people? Don't they have to migrate to the new service first?

I personally never read my twitter stream - it’s too noisy and to much of a pain to cull.

I read it by proxy prismatic, and news.me. And I mainly use it to post - for those who do read twitter, to the widget on my blog, and to Facebook.

I suspect that a replacement twitter could handle the last 2 use cases fine - which are the main point for me.

If you use Tweetbot on another service and no one is around to hear it does it make a make a tweet?

Could be.

Could also be related to Mountain Lion having Twitter integration all over the place. Seems like that would render all the hours of dev time to create this program pointless unless they can release early and get some market share before ML.

I'm not sure the two conflict. Twitter integration doesn't offer any kind of twitter browsing experience, only posting from other apps. I use the iOS integration for some posting, but consume and post most of my stuff through Tweetbot on iPad and iPhone.

You might be right. Tweetbot for iPhone was launched under similar circumstances - not too long after the first anti-developer statement from Twitter.

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