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Twitter Is Killing Several of Its TV Apps, Too (techcrunch.com)
Twitter is shutting down its TV apps on Roku, Android TV and Xbox starting on May 24, the company announced this morning. From a report: The news of the apps' closure comes at a time when Twitter is now trying to steer its users to its first-party mobile apps and its desktop website by killing off apps used by a minority of its user base -- like the Twitter for Mac app it shut down earlier this year. And more recently, it has attempted to kill off popular third-party Mac apps with a series of unfriendly API changes.
It's unclear why this has become Twitter's agenda. While it can be a burden for a company to support a broader ecosystem of apps where some only have a niche audience, in some cases those "niche" users are also the most influential and heavy users. And arguably, anyone launching Twitter's app on their TV must be a die-hard user -- because who is really watching that much Twitter on their TV?
It's unclear why this has become Twitter's agenda. While it can be a burden for a company to support a broader ecosystem of apps where some only have a niche audience, in some cases those "niche" users are also the most influential and heavy users. And arguably, anyone launching Twitter's app on their TV must be a die-hard user -- because who is really watching that much Twitter on their TV?
I have far more important things to do than concern myself with what you peons do on Twitter and Facebook. Let's have some real news for once, not just crap about Twitter that appeals to millennial simpletons.
- gweihir
...when everything Twitter is finally killed off. They are a cancer on the global subconsciousness.
mnem
Modding me down won't make this any less true.
I still will probably use Twitter from time to time, but I have to say there has never been a better time for some kind of Twitter alternative to come along... seriously thinking of moving to the Mastodon project regardless of no-one else on earth being there. It's not like I cared if people what I thought anyway... :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... but they know he uses an iPhone.
"While it can be a burden for a company to support a broader ecosystem of apps where some only have a niche audience, in some cases those "niche" users are also the most influential and heavy users. And arguably, anyone launching Twitter's app on their TV must be a die-hard user -- because who is really watching that much Twitter on their TV?"
Except that i think that someone who is really that "influential" on twitter already has the app on a mobile device as well as has that device nearby. This article is BS, its just twitter cleaning house and not supporting development costs that are not creating a return and given that twitter can amalgamate all of the statistics of who uses which clients and which of those people is actually influential to the network thus putting a return value on that person/app's value. It is not hard to come up with some sort of evaluation that determines if the costs are worth the returns.
many of the other apps don't show ads? I'm surprised the desktop site doesn't block you if you're running adblockers (great, I'm probably going summon APK
It seems like the Mastondon.technology group (which is where I'd want to move to) are a bunch of censorship nazis who block anyone that doesn't adhere to a rigid speech code, who wants to deal with that nonsense?
Blocking such scary content providers as "libertarianism.club" and "toot.love". Funny how they only seem to block love, not hate...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
MURDERERS! Oh, wait, shutting down? You wrote they were killing them, you lying bastards. *sigh*
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
And arguably, anyone launching Twitter's app on their TV must be a die-hard user -- because who is really watching that much Twitter on their TV?
No one. That's why they are shutting it down. The amount of users utilizing the TV app is probably too low to justify the expense of maintaining it.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
A long time ago, I programmed an application that relied on the Twitter API. For a long time, the Twitter API was a reliable way of building an application that utilized Twitter. I'd even argue that this contributed to Twitter's growth: People could third party applications with great new features to interact with Twitter instead of just the official application.
All was good for awhile, but then Twitter not only changed the API (which is to be expected from time to time) but radically reduced the amount of calls a developer could make to the API - with exceptions for the existing big API users. Essentially, they were locking the big players in (while limiting how much more they could grow) and ensuring that no other Twitter API-based application rose to prominence. Instead, they wanted people to just use the official Twitter applications. While I could understand why they made this move (steering people to Twitter's official applications increases chances to show those people ads and make money off of them), it severely damaged the third party ecosystem that grew around Twitter. They've done a few more of these API changes to all but kill off any non-official Twitter app.
I've since ditched that Twitter application. It's a shame because I thought it had potential to be helpful to people, but I couldn't invest time and money into an application that could be killed off by one more Twitter press release.
The basic lesson to be learned here is: Your application isn't truly yours if it relies on an API for a service that you don't control.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Plus, it kept spamming everyone that your milk had gone bad.
You are welcome on my lawn.
hey now why would you want him to damage a woodchipper like that??
...causing millions of readers to immediately ask, "Twitter has a tv app?"