tenthofjune

I’ve been a long time user of Tweetie, first for Mac, then later on the iPhone. A few weeks ago, when Twitter bought Atebits, the developer of Tweetie, there was much concern that this spelt the death knell of the Mac desktop version, especially as this was (and still is) languishing at version 1.2.6 while the iPhone app had moved to version 2 with a couple of updates on top of that.

Yesterday, Twitter rolled out their replacement for the Tweetie iPhone app, called, not surprising, Twitter for iPhone. I will probably update to that but there appear to be some issues with the way it does a retweet, so I haven’t done so yet. I was therefore surprised to see Echofon claiming that I had tweeted from “Twitter from iPhone” when I had done no such thing. I had actually been using Tweetie for Mac (on the desktop):

This, however, was not the fault of Echofon, as the web page was also lying:

A quick search on twitter showed that others were also noticing this. The problem is that both Tweetie for Mac and Tweetie for iPhone use basic authentication and are registered with the same token. (thanks to Matt Roberts) When Twitter changed the tag from “Tweetie” to “Twitter for iPhone”, it meant that both incarnations of Tweetie were being retagged, one of them wrongly.

The conclusion is that either Twitter has overlooked the consequence of changing the tag or more worryingly that they really don’t care about Tweetie for Mac and are happy to have Tweetie for Mac users advertising an iTunes link to the iPhone app.

Tweetie for Mac is however still available on atebits.com.