I use Twitter only professionally now and have killed off my personal accounts except for a Twitter-Bot that posts when new blog posts go live. TweetBot for iOS and Mac have been my favorite personal clients for a very long time.
As M.G. Siegler wrote, “Yes, it’s $12.99. But you should be okay paying for a piece of software you’re going to use a ton. Plus, it’s OS X Yosemite-pretty. “
$12.99 is nothing for a piece of software written by seasoned coders who support their user base day and night and work on their apps full time. If only Twitter charged $10 a year for their service, they wouldn’t be in such dire financial need to shift constantly, inject ads into the timeline and cater to the investors with promises of earning improvements.
TweetBot is an application fully funded by its user base who fork over cash for a tool. Twitter and the other services should take notice. 90% of Twitter’s user base would leave but the spammers would leave, bots, trolls and others would stop using it and Twitter would be healthy with cash.
The thing about technology startups is there’s this rule that everything should be free. Quality of service, usability all go out the window. I’d gladly budget $100 a year for Google, Facebook, Twitter to charge me to not sell my data to advertisers.
If you use Twitter on iPhone or Mac, support the guys behind TweetBot.