Stolen Kisses — Life After Tweetbot

Tweetbot and I have been having an affair since its inception. From iPhone, to iPad and Mac, I simply cannot fathom using another app for my daily Twitter fix. And I’ve tried. A lot of them. Most of them? Probably not, but near everything available for iOS and OS X. And none of them come close.

There are currently two social networks that have gained any meaningful traction in the world — Twitter and Facebook. I still have my account on the latter, but I rarely use it anymore. Sometimes, perhaps once a week, I’ll notice a notification on my Mac that I missed and will open the page to see what’s happening, but I have removed the Facebook apps from my iPhone and iPad and I doubt that I’ll ever install them again. The reason for this was EdgeRank or whatever Facebook calls it these days. I spent a lot of time perfecting my list of what I want and don’t want to see and EdgeRank still thinks it knows better — despite explicitly stating that I want to follow someone, they still automatically decide whether a post will show up in my News Feed or not. This is not something I was willing to accept, hence I have now stopped using Facebook.

Twitter is where my heart lies. It always has. Or rather, it lies with the Twitter experience when using Tweetbot. It’s not something quantifiable either — I just love using Tweetbot, I love its design and how it works. I love its sync feature across platforms. It’s a masterpiece in its own right and while many of you will disagree, Tweetbot is Twitter as far as I’m concerned. I have tried using other clients and I almost hate the experience. I (almost) hate the noise that accompanies Twitter’s native apps. I hate (yep, almost — hate is a strong word) the direction they’re taking with trying to achieve more growth and engagement. I do understand them though and while I’m grateful that Twitter’s APIs still let us experience their network as it was in its infancy, I can’t help but feel that these stolen kisses will end sooner or later.

The internet has one great thing going for it though, in regard to the above. Voids tend to get filled in rather quickly. ADN was one such attempt. The most recent arrival that I took note of is Ello. The explosion of extending and asking for invitations seems to be over on my Twitter timeline, but it was a thing for a good week or so. While I cannot understand why anyone would launch without an app today, a lot of my friends are already on there. Probably just to reserve their handle. They will most probably abandon it in the next week or two, but there is an obvious need of an alternative. A free alternative unfortunately, as evidenced by ADN’s history.

The day Tweetbot stops delivering my preferred Twitter experience will be a very sad one and I only hope there will be a viable alternative ready to switch to. I do not believe I will be able accept what Twitter has become, but only time will tell. If I had to guess, I’d bet on it fading slowly out of my life the way Facebook did.

And that’s why I cherish every day spent with Tweetbot. And you should too.

★ Tweetbot 3 for iPhone — €4.49 / $4.99
★ Tweetbot 2 for iPad — €2.69 / $2.99
★ Tweetbot for Mac — €17.99 / $19.99