With more people joining Twitter and accessing the service in multiple ways,
a consistent user experience is more crucial than ever. As we talked about
last April, this was our motivation for buying Tweetie and developing our
own official iPhone app. It is the reason why we have developed official
apps for the Mac, iPad, Android and Windows Phone, and worked with RIM on
their Twitter for Blackberry app. As a result, the top five ways that people
access Twitter are official Twitter apps.

Still, our user research shows that consumers continue to be confused by the
different ways that a fractured landscape of third-party Twitter clients
display tweets and let users interact with core Twitter functions. For
example, people get confused by websites or clients that display tweets in a
way that doesn’t follow our design guidelines, or when services put their
own verbs on tweets instead of the ones used on Twitter.

As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where
every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way. This is already
happening organically - the number and market share of consumer client apps
that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking. According to
our data, 90% of active Twitter users use official Twitter apps on a monthly
basis.

So, that’s it then. Twitter grew and thrived in a flourishing ecosystem that encouraged active, open development. Hundreds of competing client apps were created to support the platform. Somehow this undesirable “inconsistent user experience” managed to shepherd in a new era of microblogging. But now Twitter doesn’t want us anymore.

And suddenly I really don’t feel like working on Buzzbird.