Twitter engineer Alex Payne sent out a prophetic tweet last month. In this message to the Twittersphere, he basically says that Twitter.com is going to be so badass and feature-rich that you’ll soon rethink your need for 3rd party Twitter clients. This caused an uproar in the developer community as many (over-reacting) people took his comments to mean Twitter was going to try & kill off the alternative clients. @Al3x and the rest of Twitter HQ went into damage control mode to explain that Twitter wasn’t attacking alternative clients and that they were still supportive of the developer community. Hugs all around, right? No. I think most people saw the writing on the wall at that point.

I know I have. So, after 2 years of developing my own Twitter clients, I’ve decided that I’m finally throwing in the towel.  Twitter has built a great web app, so there’s little need for me to continue. There’s part of me that is sad, but mostly I’m really happy for Twitter.  Also, I’m relieved as I can now focus on something else.

A little background… It wasn’t up until recently that Twitter’s own web client (Twitter.com) lacked most of the features that I wanted, so I was forced to build them on my own. I began building Tweenky almost 2 years ago and the goal was simple… create a Twitter web client that had the following features:
A) A friendly Ajax interface
B) Integrated searching
C) Groups
D) Saved searches
E) Fixed the @reply problem where replies were not visible to your replies feed unless it started with “@username”
F) Had other basic shortcut features (like retweet links)

When it was ready in the summer of ’08, I released it to the wild with the help of TechCrunch and other tech blogs, who all praised its set of features. I’m not going to claim I was the only one working on such features. Most of them were just obvious extensions to how people really wanted to use the Twitter service. They would have been implemented by Twitter themselves had the service been stable enough to add feature development resources. It’s funny to think that between 2006 and 2009 Twitter.com remained largely unchanged. Why? Because they were generating too many failwhales and fixing those was the #1 priority.

By 2009, the engineering team had rebuilt Twitter into a stable platform and they were finally able to let the front-end developers loose and start working on features. First came some ajaxy goodness, then integrated searching the replies/mentions fix. Later in the year they added Lists and the Retweet feature. At that point, I noticed Tweenky started to become less & less useful. Others did too and the userbase started to decrease.

Enter 2010… The front-end team is beginning to crank out features & tweaks at a fast pace. So far this year we’ve seen hovercards, location dectection, and integrated maps. It’s finally at the point where the speed of innovative features is out-pacing what the developer community will be able to keep up with. There are still some major clients, such as Tweetie (on the desktop) that haven’t even integrated Lists yet. I’m not going to attempt to work on the hovercards or integrated maps, not because I can’t do them, but because what’s the point? I’ve actually begun using the Twitter.com web client more than my own client because it simply lacks essential features. Sure I can add them, but once I’ve completed that, the larger-than-1-person-front-end team at Twitter will have rolled out a couple more slick features, and I will always be playing catch-up.

So here’s the point of this post… I’m done. From here on out I suspect the majority of my Twitter time will be spent on the Twitter.com web client. Don’t take this the wrong way, I’m actually really happy for Twitter and the awesome front-end/UX team they’ve assembled (which includes a number of ex-Yahoo’s =D ). They’ve implemented most of the “must-have” features that 3rd party developers have been working on for years. This is a good thing because those features are now available to the majority of the Twitter userbase instead of a small portion. I suspect over the course of 2010 and beyond, the pace that we see new features will continue to increase, and with every new release, more & more 3rd party developers will cease working on their own clients. This will be a bitter pill for some in the developer community to swallow but the side-effect is they’ll be spending less time on simple, basic features that Twitter.com should have, and instead hopefully on innovative non-client apps or things completly unrelated to Twitter.

I’m happy with this direction. The main reason I’ve developed Twitter clients is to geek around and gain experience in areas I feel my knowledge is lacking. I’ve never approached my client development as “OMG, I have to get as many people as possible to use this thing so I can make money and/or sell it!” I’ve never attempted to monetize my work. I’ve just approached it as there’s a certain user experience I want to have with Twitter, and if anyone else wants to join the fun, cool. No? That’s cool too. Work hard and good things will come.  Having converted the original Tweenky client from mostly PHP to all JavaScript, I’ve been able to gain valuable experience with jQuery, YUI3, & JS in general. To me, that is satisfying enough. All the JS, REST API, and scaling knowledge I gained through this process is one of the reasons I now have a job at Yahoo.

So what’s next? I dunno. If I’m spending X less hours per week trying to replace Twitter.com, I can now spend X hours working on something else. I’ll most certainly work on some non-client Twitter apps, but I’m hoping to spend the majority of my time on non-related Twitter projects. Maybe some much needed Node.js hacking? Maybe some WebOS apps? Hmmm… Stay tuned.

P.S. Tweenky has always been an open-source project. You can find the source code on GitHub. You can also find Tweenky’s cousin “Tweetanium” (a YUI3 rewrite) on GitHub as well.

I’ve been working on a new project recently.  Tweenky is a micro blogging client I am developing that is mostly used with Twitter, but also supports Identi.ca, and hopefully more micro-blogging services soon.  The concept behind it was the lack of any good web clients out there for Twitter, and especially ones that brought back the “track” feature that Twitter took away from us a few weeks back.  It’s still very much a work in progress and I just have to find the time to work on some of the new features and further improve stability.  I’m having a blast with pushing the boundaries of JavaScript and what it should/shouldn’t be used for.  So, if you are a Twitter user, go check it out, and if it is still requiring an invite code, use “derekville”.

So I just returned from a convention out in Santa Clara called Zendcon.  As a web developer, my primary language of choice is PHP, and Zend is the company puts most of the work into the PHP project, so this was kind of their little yearly shindig.  It was 4 days of 1-2 hour training sessions on all topics related to PHP and web development.  I saw some presentations from engineers and developers from companies such as IBM, Google, Mozilla, Digg, Yahoo, and tons more.  I met a ton of really interesting people too and had a great time at Yahoo HQ for Hackday ’08.  (note to self: Don’t wear “Hackday ’08″ shirt to airport, it leads to hacker questioning from TSA agents)

Vacation #1 was on the front & back end of the Zendcon trip as I had a few days before & after the conference to play around in San Francisco.  It’s such a cool city and I had a blast driving around in the Pontiac G6 convertible I rented for the week.  I’ve never had so much fun driving a car!

Vacation #2 is coming up next month with Katye & I flying up to Seattle where we’ll also head up to Vancouver & Victoria.  I haven’t been to Seattle in about 10 years, so I’m really excited as I love that city.  Everyone I’ve talked to raves about Vancouver too, so I’m pretty excited about my first trip north of the border.

If you are a web developer in the Kansas City area, you need to check out two emerging groups.  The first being DotNext, a group in the KC area that gets together every month or so to give sessions on anything web development related.  Last month was a series of presentations of Amazon Web Services.  This month is going to be on various database related technologies. The second group is Cowtown Computer Congress who is setting up a hacker space in North Kansas City.  For those not too familiar with what a “hacker space” is (myself included), it is a place for technologists to get together to work on  various hardware & software projects, share costs on equipment, and actually socialize (something most geeks never do much of).  So should be an awesome place to convene when it officially opens in the next couple months.

And finally, a new podcast from some rather influential people in the web development world has launched that I’d like to mention.  Open Web Podcast was created by Google engineer Dion Almaer (of the Ajaxian podcast as well), Alex Russell of Dojo, and John Resig of Mozilla/jQuery.  So if you are into web standards and JavaScript, definitely check it out.

Finally, I recently discovered the FX show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”.  Hilarious!  Check out all the episodes on Hulu.