People seem to be up in arms about the latest Twitter for iPhone (v3.3) update, and I can understand why.
There are actually many good things to talk about in the latest version, such as the auto @username suggest feature and improved DM messaging. That being said, one new “feature” was introduced called the trends “Quickbar”.
The main gripe I have with this, and so do many others is that it’s extremely intrusive. The translucent Quickbar seems to always appear at the top of your timeline, obscuring a particular tweet that you are trying to read. This is just plain bad UX.
Dr. Drang in this piece cites:
The Twitter app is free, after all, and it seems small and whiny to complain about promotional features in a free app. But it wasn’t free to me. I bought the app back when it was Tweetie—in fact, I bought it twice: first when it was Tweetie 1 and then again when it became Tweetie 2.
I’m in the same boat as Drang in that I originally purchased Loren Brichter’s Tweetie 1.0, and also equally wonderful Tweetie 2.0. Both apps had no ads, until of course Twitter bought the product from Brichter and now is rolling out their promoted Tweets as means of revenue generation.
I want to make it clear that I absolutely have no problems with advertisements, if they’re done right. I recognize, as I’m sure many of you do that people need to be able to make money and ads are a big part of many businesses. The problem is when the ads are so in your face and obnoxious that they prevent you from reading Tweets that you actually are interested in reading.
Where I disagree with Drang is that you aren’t entitled to an ad-free experience just because you paid for an app that was owned by an individual before it was sold off to another company. At the moment we’;re talking about ads in an app built off of an API that provides (currently) a free service to users worldwide.
It doesn’t cost me a penny to send out a Tweet, so my only desire and request is that Twitter’s iPhone app developers find a way to introduce promote tweets and trends in a way that doesn’t interfere with my daily Tweet consumption experience.