Tweetbot ($1.99), the long-awaited Twitter app from Tapbots, was released a few days ago on the iPhone. Early reviews were quite positive, but not everybody is completely happy with the app.
Ben Brooks of The Brooks Review stated on “The B&B Podcast” that he found the app fun to use, but a little lacking. Brooks later wrote a post entitled “AppSuration and Unique Traits“, which explains why he feels Tweetbot a) lacks a core unique feature to give users a reason to switch and b) is mainly a “wrapper” for very other, similar Twitter clients (namely the official, Ex-Tweetie Twitter app).
Marco Arment referenced Brooks’ “Appsuration” piece in a smaller post entitled “Tweetbot’s limited innovation“, which read as a very polite, but blunt statement that Tweetbot is something of a Twitter+ app (my words, not Arment’s) — something interesting, but not compelling or different enough to force a switch from the official Twitter app.
Ben Brooks later wrote another post (in response to this piece, by Sean Sperte) about user interface and user experience and stated that he didn’t think that “those two things are as important to users as designers think they are”. The quote of that sentence fragment captures only part of the picture, but, as I understand it, the point that Ben Brooks makes is similar to Marco Arment’s: that the experience behind Tweetbot is not a selling point in the same way that Echofon’s timeline syncing or Twitterrific’s in-line mentions and direct messages are.
The opinions put forth by Arment and Brooks prompted separate responses from Paul and Mark, the creators of Tweetbot. Most of these Twitter responses seemed conversational, but one tweet from @Tapbot_paul, proved a little controversial:
IMO if you don’t think UI/UX is a pretty differentiating feature you probably should be an Android user.
Paul Haddad’s tweet wasn’t technically an @reply at any user or tweet in particular, but it did sound like a techy version of “if you don’t like it, there’s the door” aimed at Tweetbot criticism. The tweet prompted Ben Brooks to post a final response, entitled “A Feature“, which discussed the tweet as if it were addressed to him.
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This is about as far as I’ve tracked the story today and although I haven’t included every relevant tweet, to be quite honest, I’ve already had my fill. I admire both camps and don’t see them as sitting on opposite sides of the fence, so it has been a little awkward watching this UI/UX dispute unfold over Twitter and RSS. However, it has been an interesting little back-and-forth regarding where people stand on the status of a “fun user experience” as a selling point.
I have also learned how awkward it can be to track discussions across several Twitter user feeds. Conversation views really need to get better.
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