UberSocial

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

~ the last words ~

ubersocial was a blackberry app before it was anything else, and blackberry was never my phone. in the years it mattered i was moving through nokia and then android, like most people around me in turkey. the blackberry, with its keyboard and its business-email reputation, was a device i saw other people carry.

the app started as ubertwitter, and for a while it was the way a lot of people read twitter on a blackberry, back when reading twitter on a phone still meant picking a third-party app to do it. bill gross's company ubermedia owned it, along with a couple of other twitter clients. in february 2011 twitter suspended ubertwitter and a sister app, saying they broke the rules around private messages and were changing the text of people's tweets to make money.

the settlement is the part worth remembering. to get back onto twitter's platform, the app had to give up the word twitter in its name, and ubertwitter became ubersocial in early 2011. it kept running for a few more years. but two things were draining at once. blackberry was falling out of the market, and twitter was steadily tightening what outside clients could do. by the middle of the decade ubermedia had turned toward location-data and advertising work, and the consumer twitter app it was named after was left to wind down.

~ the record ~

~ the rename ~

there is something clean about the way it died in name first. ubertwitter existed because twitter had not built a good phone app yet, so other people did. once twitter cared about that experience, it took the name back and then, over years, took the whole category back by limiting the api. ubersocial is a small monument to the period when the client and the network were made by different companies, before the network decided it wanted to be the only door.

~ the distance ~

i never ran it, because i never ran a blackberry. by the time i was reading twitter on a phone, it was an android app made by twitter itself. ubersocial belongs to a device and a moment i watched from the side, the last stretch when the way you used a social network was a choice you made in an app store, not a thing the network handed you.

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