3rd party apps must make up for Twitter’s incompetence

Posted on the July 24th, 2008 under Business, Technology, Twitter by Al

With Twitter continuing to be so unreliable, I think third party applications such as Twhirl, TweetDeck,  Twitterrific and possibly FriendFeed(?), just to name a few, need to add the option to keep a local copy of messages and your Following and Followers list. TweetDeck is already ahead of the game as it keep messages in a local database. But, with Twitter’s latest screw up, in which they inadvertently removed people from following others, the ability to have a backup, export or offline copy of your Following list is very important.

Who is up for the challenge?

-Al Degutis

  • sdegutis
    Sounds pretty trivial for a Cocoa programming to do this kind of thing, especially with this Twitter class from a friend. I think I might actually be up to the challenge in the next few months, if I get any spare time.
  • iaindodsworth
    TweetDeck also keeps the list of followers in the same database, which is fully accessible offline. A number of people have been using it to recreate their following list before Twitter gets round to fixing it e.g. http://twitter.com/erasrhed42/statuses/867368520 http://twitter.com/abelara/statuses/867307568 http://twitter.com/KevinHazzard/statuses/867494783

    You're post makes a great point about how twitter app developers have to add more value than most just to deal with twitter outages and API inconsistencies. I do wonder how long this good will from developers can last.
  • Now I see your point with third-party apps making up for Twitter incompetence. Sure, backup of our data could be a great addition to the services we already use as Twitter clients and I also expect to see some other backup apps intended solely to back up the followers in the nearest few days. But the problem is that they won'tsolve the core problem of Twitter instability - even if you have a backup, you can still import it Twitter only while a better option would be to be able to export the data to other substitute services.
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