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Comment by hnriot | Hacker News Reader

*The effective rule, therefore, is even simpler: “Don’t build anything for Twitter.”

Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have.

What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.

I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's perfectly reasonable of them to not make any special exemption. If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter then they'd likely give you a higher limit, but that's not the case...

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> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.

Emphasis on "supposed". It doesn't always do it, and definitely never to everyone's taste. Hence the custom clients.

> I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem and if you're duplicating their functionality then it's perfectly reasonable of them to not make any special exemption. If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter then they'd likely give you a higher limit, but that's not the case...

By now I doubt anyone is truly surprised, but it's disappointing nevertheless. Twitter's success is partly built on the explosion of Twitter clients that allowed Twitter to evolve faster than its dev team could follow (hence all the scaling issues). Then they bought a few players in the Twitter client market. And now they've strangled all the ones that remained in that market.

So basically, Twitter now has an obvious and provable history of leaving things open, deciding that thriving third-party market X is nice, stepping into it themselves, and killing everyone else there.

That's not a reputation I'd like to have for my business, when it is a piece of underlying infrastructure that depends on others to make it thrive.

Anyone starting a business from today onwards and having any critical dependency or reliance on Twitter is insane.

That's all well and good but what do you tell the investors that just gave you millions in order to get returns if you are twitter? That you can't monetize because you gotta be a nice guy and keep giving it all away for free? That will not go over well obviously.

You explain the risks accurately and truthfully to your investors, making absolutely sure that they understand those risks before you take a dime from them. Explain that Twitter has a history of behaving in ways that aren't in anyone's interest including their own, and how this leaves them even more vulnerable to disruption by the Next Big Thing than most social-networking hubs are.

People with large amounts of money rarely get that way by sharecropping for companies like Twitter, so it may not be as big a problem as you fear.

I am pretty sure the investors are aware that twitter has taken this approach, and can anticipate that some of the reaction to it will be along these lines, and yet the board decided to go ahead.

> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.

Native > Web, if you do it right. Web has a lot of UX limitations native apps don't have.

That's why we (LiveLoop) think Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc. will all grow to encompass Web Service in the application itself, rather than being replaced wholesale by Web apps the way Google wants you to.

LiveLoop is our PowerPoint plugin that makes presentations real-time collaborative without ever having to leave Office -- available at http://getliveloop.com

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Well, I am a strong believer in Native > Web. That's why we started the company -- so only alerting other people to the fact that we're doing something in the same arena. I didn't make the comment to sell to you -- there is a common cause behind why I made the comment and why I started the company.

The line between web apps with offline capability and native apps with online functionality is non existent.

Unless by native you mean written in a language that only works on a single platform.

Of course the line is existent and it is clearly visible: the browser as a general sucks in UX compared to what can you easily do with native API of your platform.

This may be true for consumer applications, but in enterprise space, Web > Native, easily. While it's much easier to implement functionality in a native application, having something run inside a browser makes it much easier for IT departments to deploy and maintain the product.

And native has features that web doesn't have. Growl on OS X, for example.

Ahem: http://www.w3.org/TR/notifications/ (although support isn't great yet: http://caniuse.com/#feat=notifications)

I have been using notifications in chrome since they were available, and they don't even come close to growl, AFAICT.

They're a bit better on OS X 10.8 with Notification Center, but still subpar overall. But that's the nature of taking a power user tool and dumbing it down for mass-market consumption.

> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8

That it's a terrible experience on many fronts, that it's slow as molasses (especially on mobile networks), that composition sucks, that multiuser blows, that it's got no idea where you left off and doesn't care, etc...?

> This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.

Crappy?

>What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8

I dunno. Ask the 100,000+ people that wanted to use the client.

> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8?

Notifications. Multiple accounts. Filters. Speed.

Twitter.com compares to (many) Twitter clients like 2004 webmail compares to native e-mail clients of the time.

Not just that: if you're using a Windows 8 tablet like the Surface (I appreciate I might be the only person doing so - it feels like that sometimes!) the Twitter web client is a terrible experience.

Because Twitter provides native clients for Android and iOS tablets their web site is simply not optimised for touch. It's crappy on Windows 8, plain and simple.

> "If you wrote a client that exposed twitter to new markets or something that added value to Twitter"

That's exactly what happened here. Twitter does not currently have a native Win8 client, and a native client has always been a value-add for Twitter's users - many people prefer to have an always-on Twitter widget on their machine that pushes messages to them, over a browser window they have to poll.

I haven't used this software myself, but it certainly seems like something that is welcomed by Windows users and improves the experience for the relevant set of Twitter users.

The root problem here is unsurprising: for many web startups what's good for users is not good for the company. The modern, ad-driven web company is a precarious balance between tending to the sheep and throwing them at the wolves as hard as you can.

The message from Twitter reads "It does not appear that your service addresses an area that our current or future products do not already serve", which I interpret to mean they could be planning a future native app that this might be inferior to.

"I don't get anyone is surprised, it's Twitter's ecosystem"

While that may be true, Twitter has a lot of its popularity and mechanics to thank for from the third party apps.

Think of hashtags and slashtags: http://gigaom.com/2010/04/30/the-short-and-illustrious-histo...

Even the verb 'to tweet' and the bird imagery allegedly came from outside of Twitter.

If it weren't for Loren Brichter's app Tweetie, I probably wouldn't have even bothered with using Twitter.

Twitter.com is slow. I pretty much stopped using twitter altogether instead.

And it lacks functionality. I used to use Brizzly and when that shut down my Twitter use went way down.

For the past several years the Facebook mobile site has been much better and performed faster than the iphone app.

Why then have people still been using the facebook app?

When you realize the answer to that, you'll understand.

There are things clients do much better than the website. Tweetbot, for instance, makes having multiple accounts a LOT easier than logging out and back in. Plus stuff like OS notifications, general OS integration, filtering ("oh god I'm sick of hearing about #obama and #romney, I already voted")… Clients definitely make Twitter more worthwhile for a user.

Sadly what makes Twitter more valuable for a user does not necessarily make the user more valuable for Twitter.

"What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8..."

What's wrong with everyone using the same web browser? After all, that's exactly what the HTML standard is for, right?

> What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8? This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.

Moreover, it works remarkably great in Win8. Add a direct link to twitter.com on your start page, and it feels like a fullscreen native app in virtually every way.

> Exactly, that's precisely the message they wanted you to have.

The message they want you to have is "build boring enterprisey stuff".

>What's wrong with using the twitter.com on Windows8, do we really need a special client just for Windows 8?

Yes. Opening a web browser, typing twitter.com on a phone keyboard, waiting for it to load, logging in on a phone keyboard, then using a mobile site that is built to target as many users on mobile across different devices and versions is much less enjoyable than tapping the twitter icon on a phone and having it open an app built for that phone and that os, then load tweets without further action.

>This is exactly what the web is supposed to do.

That line of reasoning was true before 2008-2010, before smartphones became ubiquitous and before smart phone app experiences became way better than their mobile counterparts. Using the web on a phone is not this great, fun experience. It's typically a pain that involves a lot of typos, and a lot of zooming in, zooming out and scrolling.

Windows 8 does not run on phones.

His argument would apply to tablets, where Windows 8 does run, about equally well.

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