Be Excellent To Each Other

Yesterday Twitter faffed with their website again, then the Chrome/web app for Tweetdeck was rebranded in Twitter blue, like everything else, and almost all functionality was stripped from it. This is the result of Twitter buying Tweetdeck last May. I've ranted about this a lot already, and am wondering what the point of buying a social network aggregating power-user app, stripping it of functionality for other networks, taking out most of the interface features that made it helpful in the first place and homogenising it might be, unless twitter is simply trying to claw back all control of how people interact with their service, having opened it up nicely from the start in order to get popular.

My cynical prediction - eventually you'll have Twitter's own app for web, handheld, etc and it will funnel adverts into your eyes like a big fat cock jizzing culltural poison into the face of an unsuspecting metaphorical child.

Has anyone else been affected by these issues? How does it make you feel? What might be the eventual outcome of all this? Is it time for the pub yet?

Meh, I couldn't get on with tweetdeck before anyway, and dumped it sharpish.

As far as adverts are concerned, and the interface changing to facilitate them, unless it moves to a model where I have to click through ads to get to my feed or to post, or a 15 second video clip everytime I open the app up, it is unlikely to change my outlook. I assume that they're going to have to monetise Twitter (more, rather, increase the monetisation) soonish, as revenues must still be low.

I'm rather worried about updating tbh. Most people seem to not like it.

I don't mind the changes on the site. To my mind, mixing in follows, stars, RTs, and @reply notification into the single "Connect" view is a good idea, and it's easy to go back to the old way. The "Discover" tab is still bollocks -- the same old trending topics and recommended stories I didn't care about before, but at least they aren't in my face. The hiding away of direct messages under the Me tab makes me SADFACE though.

The changes to the iOS app are pretty ropey though. John Gruber has a great writeup. Still, I moved to Tweetbot a long, long time ago on iPhone so essentially I don't care -- unless Twitter starts making more moves against the third party client ecosystem. We'll see.

Sadly:is absolutely correct. Things have to change, or Twitter will simply go away altogether; I accept that.

I prefer the new iOS app to the old iOS app.

Apart from it seems to forget when stuff was done, so it's a bit harder to navigate when you've not checked it in an hour or two.

I think it is better organised though.

tbf, people have been saying that about Twitter for years.

Yeah, my experience was that it's well worth the effort at present, and the curve is working well with those interested in it.

I've tried Seesmic on the web, which can't remember what its colour scheme is supposed to be, won't let me adjust the font size and won't let me get rid of the useless bar (with facebook and Foursquare links etc) that I have no real need of. Seesmic Desktop addresses all these issues, but it's not embedded in a chrome tab where I want this sort of thing to be and being made out of Silvershite it takes up THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MEGS of RAm, ffs.

I've tried Timbo which is cock and a couple of others as well, which are also cock.

They've ruined tweetdeck, but it is still better than the competition. That's what they've spent the last 6 months doing - figuring out how to cripple it as much as possible without people defecting.