Marco.org

Ben Brooks on Tweetbot:

While I have yet to decide if I like Tweetbot any more, or less, than I like the official Twitter app — I did note two annoying things:

1. The app doesn’t have the “one” single feature that is unique to it.
2. The app feels like a nice wrapper of eye candy applied over the existing apps out there (mainly the official Twitter app).

I agree. Tweetbot is a very good app, but I’m sticking with the official Twitter app for now because it’s also a very good app, it seems faster and more responsive to me, I know it’s not going anywhere, and I already know how to use it efficiently.

Full-featured Twitter clients need to have so many features that switching has a learning curve and an indirect cost. It’s not difficult, but it takes time to develop the habits to navigate each app efficiently.

A new Twitter client that essentially offers the Twitter app’s features, but in different places, isn’t enough of a difference for me to switch. If anything, it supports Twitter’s “don’t make full-featured apps” position. Maybe they were right.

This isn’t to say that Tweetbot shouldn’t exist as an option for people who really do like it a lot better than all of the other full-featured Twitter clients. It really is very good. But it lacks significant reasons why anyone should switch to it if they already like their Twitter client of choice.