On Twitter clients, SXSW and user experience

Well, there has been quite a to-do this past weekend about Twitter's thoughts on other clients on their infrastructure - here is the Techmeme leaderboard article on Monday morning from The NextWeb with maybe a bit of clarity:

Twitter’s Lead of Application Services Raffi Krikorian explain things in a little more detail. For one, Sarver defines a Twitter client as:

“one that recreates the twitter experience, or the “primary” experience. So I don’t consider Instagram or Foursquare in that group. It’s apps that render a user their timeline. Apps that post into Twitter are great and explicitly called out at the bottom of the email. “

Secondly, he specifically mentions this new ‘guideline’ only refers to consumer apps. Sarver says:

“we are specifically talking about consumer clients. HootSuite and Seesmic are focused on a more enterprise or marketer audience as I called out at the bottom of the email.”

Defineing Seesmic as "marketer" focussed and say Tweetdeck as "Consume" focussed seems a tad hair splitting to me, so is this really about signalling Chosen Partners?

But anyway, I do subscribe to the view that this is far to early to clamp down on innovation, this whole area is hardly over yet. Take for example, the matter of SXSW filtering. For those who don't know the impact, when SXSW happens everyone you know who is there tends to overtweet (quantity goes up) about the most vapid sh*t (quality goes down) and even worse, about a great time they are having while I am working!

Fortunately, on Tweetdeck, you can filter this all out, so I have experienced a blissfully SXSW free tweetstream. You can't do that on the bog-standard Twitter client. QED, as they say.

But of course 3rd party filtering not only increases my listening pleasure, it can potentially stop monetisation methods (aka Ads) so no doubt that is a part of the rationale for Twitter's action. Our recommendation has long been to charge those people who use the APIs heavily as clients - would put the funding problem back on the shoulders of those standing on Twitter's shoulders....