Studio Rockstar

Just a couple of days ago, IconFactory released a new version of Twitterific — Twitterific 3.0. Since Twitterific first came out, I’ve been a huge fan of the program. It’s what made Twitter useful, especially during the time that the website was taking 30 seconds to 5 minutes to load.

Why I suddenly feel jipped

My first reaction was: finally! I can use Twitterific on Leopard again! YES!

My second reaction was: crap! I wish I could use the old Twitterific — without the ads. But I can’t, because it doesn’t work on Leopard.

Creating mandatory updates that require a purchase is a huge no-no in the software land. Even if your product was free before. You notice that the 2.0 branch isn’t supported anymore — it just dissapeared. This is pretty insulting to me, as it’s holding bug fixes hostage.

But it’s still free! There’s just ads!

That’s not free. If someone says it’s free, I ask them to answer these two questions to themselves:

1. Does IconFactory make money from the product?
2. Does the product require more of your mental time?

Mind share is a valuable currency — it’ just a different format than dollars and cents. Ad-supported is ad-supported — it is most definitely not free.

Supporting Developers

Many people point out that we need to support developers. I whole heartedly agree. However, there seems to be something missing in this argument: IconFactory went from a relatively niche company to a company known to nearly every twitter-going Mac user and then some. Because of that, I can guarantee the traffic to their site has increased, the number of backlinks have increased, and their sales have increased (they sell many products). The overall value of their company has increased as a result of this application.

By simply creating a program, they were able to purchase the best kind of advertising: the kind people willingly go out and download and install on their computers. To me, this is ample payment. In the same vein people distribute free Wordpress themes in order to gain popularity to their own sites — this application was an advertising tool.

To me, IconFactory has been amply supported. I would be willing to bet any costs of developer time have been offset by extra sales. (keep in mind this is a loaded statement with no supporting facts).

This move was about looking for more routes of monetization, not developer support.

It’s just not that complicated of an application

I’m sorry: but it’s true. It’s a GUI for a web services backend. Sure, they’ve got conditional formatting, OS integration and all that jazz — but let’s try and compare it to the complexity of other application like Firefox, YourSQL, Quicksilver, TextMate, Transmit, Parallels, etc. Twitterific is but a pea compared to these giants. The development time required for an application like Twitterific is insignificant compared to other comparably-priced OS X applications.

Conclusion

I’m pretty sure a lot of people that read this will adamantly disagree with me. That’s fine: I’m comfortable being a loner with an opinion. But in the meantime, I’m using Jonathan Snook’s excellent Snitter to get my Twitter fix.