Congratulations, Twitter: You Blew It. [Tweetie]

Writing about Tweetie for Mac updates has become some sort of a joke to me. “Tweetie for Mac has been updated? Yeah, sure.” That’s why many people last night didn’t initially believe Twitter actually pushed an update with OAuth support, and once they realized it was real, they just didn’t update. Why? Because they’re not trusting Loren Brichter anymore. And considering what happened to Tweetie for Mac last night, go prove them wrong.

Basically, Tweetie for Mac is no longer working: 8 times out of 10 it returns an error when trying to post a status update or refresh the timeline. It was a smooth (although outdated) app before, now it fails to fetch tweets. Great job with the OAuth support. (and of course, revoking access in Twitter.com and deleting cache and preferences on your Mac don’t help either).

But that’s n0t the main point. It’s what Tweetie for Mac is turning into that concerns me. In case you haven’t noticed, the latest 1.2.7 update removed img.ly, posterous and Pix.im support from image sharing services and that should be because they have disabled “posting to image hosts using the deprecated authentication method.” The guys over at Posterous, though, don’t know why they got removed and are talking with Twitter at the moment. They support the correct OAuth Echo APIs, and I wouldn’t be surprised to know that img.ly supports them too. Also, ads have been removed, but there’s still an option in the preferences to enable them. Twitter says Fusion Ads will be officially discontinued on July 1st. What’s the point then? Last, retweets. What’s funny is that Tweetie is owned by Twitter, but it doesn’t support official retweets, at least in a form that we could define “decent”. If you’re a Tweetie for Mac user, you know what I’m talking about.

I have the feeling that Twitter doesn’t care about Tweetie for Mac as it is. A MacStories reader emailed their support team asking about the 2.0 version, they confirmed it is “still in development” and that there will be “tons of new features”. I believe them.

I believe them because they’re turning Loren’s original plans for Tweetie 2 into a self-promoting, retweets-enabled, sponsored tweets-powered huge piece of crap. Since the app was bought months ago, the original vision died with it and we’re never going to see that Tweetie 2.0 again. What’s worse though - and I’ll never grow tired of saying this - is how Tweetie customers were a) seduced to buy Tweetie 1.x, b) left behind with no updates for months, c) seduced again to enter MacHeist in order to get the chance of trying Tweetie 2 Beta (!) and then d) left behind again with a broken app gone official. If you call this “caring about your customers” or “that’s how the market works”, I don’t care.

Congratulations, Twitter team. You blew it.