Twitter has decided that the best way forward for it is to collect and control the ways that users view tweets and other information shared on the network. Now, nearly six years since the first version of Twitterrific was released - and after nearly a year of work - Twitterrific 5 makes its debut in a very different environment for Twitter developers. Among these is the use of a bird to represent Twitter (Iconfactory calls him Ollie), the first use of the word ‘tweet’, the first in-app implementation of replies and conversations and a bunch of other stuff.

The material contributions of the app to the Twitter ecosystem are documented in a short list of ‘ Twitterrific firsts‘. Eventually it would include Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry, Gedeon Maheux and David Lanham Loren Brichter, of Tweetie for iOS and Mac, which Twitter would later go on to acquire and later others like Paul Haddad and Mark Jardine of Tweetbot.īut The Iconfactory, more than many other developers, helped to define the Twitter experience through its beautiful and unique Twitterrific. Twitter had a developer ecosystem building for it that is essentially unmatched. That interface and the challenge of bringing form to Twitter was enough for The Iconfactory to begin work on Twitterrific. And they weren’t alone. This was facilitated by an application programming interface that Twitter provided which allowed easy access to reading and writing Twitter data.

The development of third-party apps, especially on mobile devices, ended up being the catalyst for Twitter’s growth as a product.

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