Winding down my Twitter apps
Manton Reece:
Last week, Twitter announced that they’ve expanded their search index to include the full history of tweets going back to 2006. I was thrilled by this upgrade to the Twitter service. That the search was so limited for so long was the primary reason I built Tweet Library and Watermark to begin with. Unfortunately, this functionality is only for the official Twitter apps. It will not be made available to third-party developers.
It’s time for me to wind down development on my Twitter-related apps. I’ll continue to sell Tweet Library through the end of 2014, then remove it from the App Store. Watermark will also shut down at that time. Because all the tweets stored in Watermark are public tweets (by design it never supported DMs or protected accounts), I will attempt to make the entire Watermark database archive of millions of tweets available publicly. Existing customers can also sync tweets and collections to Dropbox for personal archiving.
It’s sad. So many developers want to serve the needs of Twitter’s users, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that Twitter prefers to serve the needs of it’s shareholders.
To be fair, Twitter’s official app has gotten better, but it simply is not good enough. Now, more than ever, I wish I could find a social network that aimed to be part of the solution, and not that problem.