I’m the guest on this week’s Mac Power Users podcast. In addition to workflow and apps I use, the discussion went off the rails a little into the Twitter app ecosystem, especially the fact that I no longer post to Twitter yet still have apps like Tweet Library, Watermark, and the Tweet Marker API that depend on Twitter. For the last 2 years this has been an odd decision on my part; I want to do the right thing for my customers, but I’m increasingly frustrated with life as a third-party Twitter developer.
Last week, Twitter announced that they’ve expanded their search index to include the full history of tweets going back to 2006. I was thrilled by this upgrade to the Twitter service. That the search was so limited for so long was the primary reason I built Tweet Library and Watermark to begin with. Unfortunately, this functionality is only for the official Twitter apps. It will not be made available to third-party developers.
It’s time for me to wind down development on my Twitter-related apps. I’ll continue to sell Tweet Library through the end of 2014, then remove it from the App Store. Watermark will also shut down at that time. Because all the tweets stored in Watermark are public tweets (by design it never supported DMs or protected accounts), I will attempt to make the entire Watermark database archive of millions of tweets available publicly. Existing customers can also sync tweets and collections to Dropbox for personal archiving.
Published collections from Tweet Library or Watermark will be maintained indefinitely. No URLs will break, ever. Updating published collections will also continue to work for anyone who already owns Tweet Library.
I will also continue to host the Tweet Marker API, but starting in January I will be more strict about requiring developers to pay for the service. Many developers have been paying for API access for a year (thank you!), but others have missed or ignored my requests to move to a paid plan. It’s not fair to the Twitter developers who have been paying for Tweet Marker access if some continue get the API for free.
Many friends have told me over the years that I have too many products. But letting any one product go is not easy. There’s an implicit promise when shipping software that the developer should maintain and improve it for customers. Stopping development on these apps is the right decision and possibly long overdue, but it’s still difficult. What gives me hope is that it will let me focus on new projects currently in development, which I couldn’t be more excited about.
