MetroTwit

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

~ the obit ~

MetroTwit began on 27 March 2010, when Long Zheng put a screenshot of a concept on his blog: a Twitter client drawn in Microsoft's Metro design language, mostly typography and whitespace, with the window chrome taken away. The response was strong enough that a closed beta started inside the month and a public beta was out by early June. Zheng built it with David Golden and Winston Pang, all three in Australia, on .NET 4.0 and Windows Presentation Foundation.

There was a period when nothing on any platform looked better, and the people whose opinion carried weight on Windows said so where everyone could see it. Joanna Stern's review at The Verge called it one of the best looking ones out there. Joe Belfiore, then a corporate vice president for Windows Phone at Microsoft, tweeted that it felt familiar. Version 1.0 shipped for Windows 7 and Vista in March 2012, with a native Windows 8 edition following in the Store. A paid MetroTwit Plus tier added multiple-account support.

The marketing copy deserves a line of its own. Undo tweet was described as having a DeLorean built in, flux capacitors included. Support for Twitter's streaming API was sold as being faster than a peregrine falcon. This was a product made by people enjoying themselves.

On 5 March 2014 at 8:53 pm AEST the three of them published a post titled Sunsetting MetroTwit: all good things must come to an end. The installer and the Windows 8 Store listing came down effective immediately. More than 400,000 people had used the app across its four years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the token ceiling ~

Twitter's August 2012 developer policy put a hard number on third-party clients: 100,000 user tokens, and no more without permission. A rate limit throttles your requests and a pricing tier charges you for them. This was a cap on how many people a competing client was allowed to serve at once, which made growth the failure condition rather than the goal. MetroTwit asked Twitter to extend its cap and Twitter did not offer to. Once the ceiling was crossed, new tokens would stop being issued and the app would start failing for everyone who had already installed it, so the team retired it ahead of that instead of after it. Nobody's timeline went blank without warning.

~ the comeback tour ~

Seven months after the sunset, on 15 October 2014 at 10:33 pm AEST, MetroTwit shipped version 1.2.0.1. The post announcing it is titled The Comeback Tour and the body runs three lines: "Emergency hotfix. P.S. Not really coming back. Release notes: Fixed Twitter API issue due to POODLE SSL vulnerability."

POODLE was the SSL 3.0 padding attack disclosed that same month, and the industry response was to switch SSL 3.0 off everywhere, which broke API calls for anything still negotiating it. So the app was breaking for whoever still had it on a machine, a group that was paying nothing and could not be sold anything either. Three developers with no product and no revenue fixed it anyway, in an evening, and shipped the release under a joke title with the disclaimer attached inside the post.

I was not a MetroTwit user. By 2014 the sensible place to read Twitter on a work machine was the website, because the clients were being closed one at a time and you could see the order they were going in. What brings me back to this one is the host. metrotwit.com still answers under its original title, still serving the original marketing page, with a line over the top of it saying MetroTwit has been discontinued and download is no longer available. Below that sit a dozen goodbye tweets from 5 and 6 March 2014, embedded as blockquotes that Twitter's widget script no longer renders, so what you actually read is the plain fallback text. The page is also still loading the old Google Analytics script and a Facebook SDK that stopped being a going concern years ago.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »