Twitterrific

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

~ the eulogy ~

twitterrific was the first popular twitter client. the iconfactory in greensboro, north carolina shipped the mac version on 15 january 2007, less than a year after twitter itself had launched. when twitter was still a text-message product nobody knew what to call its posts, twitterrific used the word "tweet" to describe a single one. that word stuck. twitter eventually adopted it, and so did the rest of the english-speaking internet.

the iphone version arrived on 8 july 2008, on the same day apple opened the app store, and it won an apple design award later that year. for a long stretch in 2008 and 2009 twitterrific was the app that taught new iphone users what twitter was. when twitter started buying out its own ecosystem with the 2010 acquisition of tweetie, twitterrific kept going as the paid alternative for an audience that wanted a designed third-party app instead of the official one.

i used twitter from a browser on a desktop and from whatever default client shipped on my android phone. i never owned an iphone where twitterrific made sense to install. it was the kind of app you bought on principle: paid software in a category of free ad-supported clients, made by a small dev shop that had been doing it longer than twitter had existed.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it gave to twitter ~

twitterrific shipped a blue bird icon before twitter had its own bird brand. the iconfactory's craig hockenberry drew the icon for the app, twitter saw it everywhere on macs and iphones, and twitter eventually moved its own logo toward a bird as well. the word "tweet" came out of the app, not the platform. for two years in 2007 and 2008 the unofficial third-party client was supplying both the language and the visual identity for the official service.

this was a peculiar relationship. twitter at the time was a mailing list with no clear business model and no clear ui. its third-party developers built the streaming timeline, push notifications, threaded replies. twitterrific was the most visible of those builders. when twitter eventually tightened its api in 2012, the apps that had taught it how to act like a product were the first ones it told to back off.

~ the postmortem ~

12 january 2023. without warning, twitter started returning errors to third-party app api requests. nobody at twitter said anything for days. on 17 january twitter quietly updated its developer agreement to ban third-party clients. on 19 january the iconfactory posted a short notice that twitterrific was discontinued. the mac app was pulled from the store. the iphone app stopped functioning on every device that had it installed.

twitterrific had been alive for sixteen years and one week. its developers had built it through the entire arc of twitter's identity changes, ending with the elon musk era. it ended the way most third-party apps end: not through a long decline but through a single api revocation by a platform that had no obligation to keep it alive. it was old enough that some of its users had been using it longer than they had used anything else on their phone.

~ the long tail ~

the iconfactory pivoted, like several other twitter-client teams, to mastodon. they built ivory, a mastodon client with the same design language. it works. mastodon is a smaller world. ivory is a quieter app for a quieter network, and the iconfactory still ships both the mac and ios versions out of greensboro.

twitter is now x. the bird is gone. the word "tweet" is gone from x's official language too, replaced with "post." the only place the original 2007 vocabulary still survives is in the mouths of users who joined before the rebrand and never agreed to drop the word.

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