Kind of a Hater

Good god, did you really just build an app for Twitter?

Wren is a Twitter app for Mac that lets you tweet without being distracted by those you follow. Just tweet and get out.

Nice idea, but kind of useless because Mountain Lion already lets you do this.

But the question isn’t why people decided to build a Twitter app with suspect utility. The real question is: Why build a Twitter app at all? It’s such a bad idea.

Twitter recently fucked third parties that build Twitter-based products, and the news is all over the place.

But Twitter’s latest action isn’t really news — the company said it was going to start making it harder for third parties to use Twitter last year. Even without that particular bit of information, Twitter has increasingly screwed third-party apps over the years.

Scroll to the end of Wren’s website to see who created the app: A developer and a designer. That’s fine.

But if they were serious about Wren they needed to take off their “designer” and “developer” hats and put on their “product” and “market” caps:

Who needed this solution? No one, really — especially with Mountain Lion doing the same thing.
Do people need another Twitter app? Hell no.
Does Twitter screw people who build on its platform? Yes.

“If you build it, they will come” is such a bullshit way to build a product. This is not to say you shouldn’t take risks if you think you got something great in the offing. But take a step back and take a dispassionate view of your idea: If you think that it is too easy to get distracted by other people’s tweets, ask around and see if that’s really the case. (It’s not the case.)

But even more important: You need to know what’s going on when you play with other companies’ tools. Twitter has consistently made it clear that it doesn’t want others playing with their stuff. It sucks and it’s stupid, but there you go.

Wren was dead before Twitter crucified it.