HN Explorer

Ask HN: Would you pay for a Twitter client web app?

6 points by AlexLa ↗ HN
I'm in the design process of a Twitter app. Basically its a twitter client ( yeah, another one ) that arranges you tweets timeline in a different way then all the other apps do. I know that the creators of twitter don't recommend to work on the apps that somehow improve the presentation of the tweets. They told that this is their goal ( to improve user experience ) and there is a possibility that the features that your app has could be implemented in their web interface and you could loose your clients.

So the question is: is it worth to work on a twitter client and how much would you pay for such a service a month?

7 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 25.4 ms ] thread
qpleple
It is risky indeed, if twitter.com implements your killer feature, you will lose everything.

But you can play with that, or go some direction Twitter doe not want to take.

You will have to improve much much more the way tweets are displaid before I pay for that kind of service every month.

AlexLa
Thanks for reply. I think I'm going to implement this project sometime for myself anyway. And maybe release it to public. I thinking of some project to start to work on and one of the ideas was this twitter client and another one is a project management app (which is hard to market).
instakill
> Basically its a twitter client that arranges you tweets timeline in a different way then all the other apps do.

Are you aware of Twitter's updated policy regarding third party clients and building pure-play clients that aren't allowed to look and feel different to Twitter.com?

AlexLa
No, thanks for pointing out. I didn't know they put it into TOS. At the time I read about it, it was more in a form of advice.
jeffool
I'm going to be honest; I almost laughed at the premise...

But then I realized how many times I've said "God I wish someone would create an intuitive way to read conversations on Twitter." All the broken references, replies not done as replies, and offshoots of conversations can be an amazing pain to attempt to make sense of.

Would I pay? Probably not. But I'm not laughing at the idea.

AlexLa
Yeah, twitter experience could be really painful sometimes. That's why I asked is it worth to work on the problem. But I didn't know that twitter guys answered the question few months ago in their TOS.
starter
No, I don't think so. Why? A client simply doesn't make me money. Would you pay for an email client?