Iphone India

The Twitter bird has had much to keep up with lately. With over 145 million registered users now, the micro blogging website is concentrating on how the tweeting experience can be made as available and simple as possible.

Twitter applications moved to OAuth, an authentication which lets you use apps without them storing your password, just a few days back. This required all third-party app makers to move to the more secure environment. This did create some discomfort to the developers because they were notified about the move after the requirement was effected.

Additionally, Twitter has been rolling out its own clients for Blackberry, Android and iPad devices. The explanation offered has been rather “corporate” in nature – veiling the actual motive (ring in profitability at last) with a “user experience” jingle. Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, wrote, “We did iPhone user tests and confirmed that even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called “Twitter.” This kept them from using Twitter at all. For this reason, we acquired Tweetie and turned it into Twitter for iPhone, complete with a new user sign-up experience. We quickly understood that we were doing users a disservice by not having a great client on each of the major mobile platforms. So, we took a similar approach with Twitter for BlackBerry (developed by RIM) and Twitter for Android, which launched a new version this week.”

This may have come off the back of some interesting statistics that he pointed out in his blog which showed that after the Twitter and mobile Twitter websites, smart phone clients and third-party clients appeared in the top 10 Twitter apps. While Twitter is still trying to make sure developers feel comfortable, it is consistently trying to plug the gaps that developers have exploited immensely. In fact, there are almost 300,000 registered apps using the API!

I really think Twitter, being such a thoroughly user integrated service, should openly declare its motives to the users behind every move it makes. People are insanely smart to not notice corporate interests and it puts them off when it is disguised and made to sound like some social activity. Twitter can, actually, leverage their relationship with its users and become a truly loved corporate entity.

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