Echofon

» see echofon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed echofon. i was a twitter user from late 2008 onward but i used the official twitter.com web client on a desktop and the official twitter mobile site on a candybar phone for the first two years. by the time i moved to ios in 2012 the third-party twitter client scene had a dozen options, and the one i ended up paying for was tweetbot. echofon sat in the same shelf but i never tried it.

echofon started as twitterfox in september 2007, kazuho okui's firefox extension that put a small twitter panel in the corner of the browser window. naan studio, okui's small studio in san francisco, shipped an iphone version called twitterfon in 2008. in september 2009 both products were renamed echofon to dodge a twitter trademark complaint about "twitter" or "twit" prefixes in third-party app names. the renamed app added push notifications and a free tier, plus an echofon pro paid tier on ios.

not closely. honestly the differentiator most people cited was sync between the mac client and the iphone client, your read position carried across devices through naan studio's own backend. roughly. tweetbot did the same thing slightly better a year later. echofon kept a base of mac users and a free-tier ios base that was probably its largest user category through 2015.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the firefox roots gave echofon a slightly different shape than tweetbot or twitterrific (cant remember whether the shape was deliberate). the desktop client did not try to act like a full tweetdeck dashboard. it was a single column with a discreet popup notification when something new arrived in your timeline. people who used it tended to keep it open in the corner of the screen all day. mac power users specifically liked the small window mode.

~ the funny part ~

on october 31 2012 naan studio dropped the mac and windows builds plus the firefox extension in one announcement to refocus on mobile. the same year twitter started signaling that third-party clients were no longer a priority for the api. anyway, the irony is that the desktop side died at the moment when twitter was friendliest to third-party developers, while the ios app survived another decade only to die when twitter actively turned hostile. the timing was backwards by every reasonable theory of what was supposed to happen.

~ the next chapter ~

on january 12 2023 twitter blocked the api endpoints that third-party clients used to fetch timelines. echofon stopped working for everyone on the same morning as tweetbot and twitterrific and every other third-party client. for some reason it took twitter another week to publicly confirm the decision was deliberate. naan studio's farewell on january 19 said the team would not support a platform that was not as open as it had been at the start. the apps stayed in the app store as paid downloads that no longer connected to anything for a few more months and then quietly disappeared.

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