3 ms·

What percentage of lines of code written for the twitter platform have just been clients? I'd be shocked if it wasn't the overwhelming majority. It may be a si

• jackowayed 17y ago
  So you pivot. Implement a feature that a niche will really like, but that the official Twitter app won't implement because it complicates things for those that don't care and fills a fairly small niche. For example, I'd love to have a client that lets me filter extremely powerfully. I should be able to filter by any field (for example, filter out whose source is Ad.ly because it's all ads), use regular expressions, etc. I think some apps come close, but I don't think any are quite as powerful as I'd like. Even if one is, there are plenty more niches to fill. An iPhone client that's not as pretty or feature-packed, but which loads instantly, for example.
• jayair 17y ago
  I think a large part of that was the growing popularity of Twitter, the low barrier to entry for creating these clients and that Twitter.com took a rather minimal approach. Most of the Twitter clients early on were built just because the creator wanted something other clients or Twitter.com didn't have. But over time that changes and you begin to serve a section of the Twitter audience. So this begs the question; has the string of recent events changed the way Twitter client developers are able to server their market. If it has then Twitter should directly address that. If it hasn't but has confused people then it is important that Twitter is open about their policies and ideologies.