Part of the Twitter experience is the many disparate applications that folks use to interact with the platform. Up until this point, it was clear exactly which way folks accessed and posted to Twitter due to a small line near the bottom of their tweets that listed the application’s name. Now, where there used to be attribution next to the timestamp, there is only empty space.
That isn’t to say that this change is the biggest of deals, as it were, but it certainly is telling. Twitter continues to move toward supporting first-party over third-party goals. Removing the “via [APPLICATION]” makes it seem like tweets come directly from Twitter and Twitter only. Gone are the halcyon days of dozens of applications communicating together for one purpose. To the naked eye, it has all gone away to be replaced with a homogeneous single client.
It’s not like this couldn’t have been predicted, however; The Next Web notes that the iPhone version of Twitter did this exact same thing back in July. It was only a matter of time until those tweaks migrated their way to the greater whole. After all, why support the market share of products in direct competition with your own?
The real hit that third-party applications will take from this is in their discoverability. Suddenly, all of those tweets that had once proudly advertised their origin are no longer causing new users to become aware of that application’s existence. Riddle me this: What will they do to compensate?
(via The Next Web, image credit via Scott Beale)
- Twitter says Linux is fundamental to, well, Twitter
- Find the nicest and worst tweeters via this heat map
- This site will tell you how early of a Twitter adopter you are
