Marco predicts that third-party Twitter apps will lose half of their users within the next 2 years:
"We won’t even be angry at Twitter — we’ll move to the official apps voluntarily, and we’ll look back on all third-party clients like we look back on Tweetie, vanity link shorteners, and third-party image hosts today: as relics of a quickly abandoned past before we all started using Twitter’s better, newer features."
During WWDC this year, Buzz Andersen gave a great talk at a small venue outside the conference. With the hindsight of several years, he talked about building Birdfeed, the challenges of competing with Tweetie, with his own struggle at perfection, and many more insights on the rise and fall of third-party Twitter apps.
It left me with a lot to think about, and I loved the old stories, screenshots, and related nostalgia. But in closing out the questions & answers, one statement in particular struck me as a nail in the coffin for third-party developers: Buzz revealed that even he now uses the official Twitter app.
