My dearest Twitter.
I love you, when we met on three and a half years ago I instantly knew we would get along. I loved your immediacy, your silliness, and I loved your potential. But recently I cant help but feel that we're starting to fall out.
I could look past your numerous rebrands, love is more than skin deep after all, I could even get over the moment when you took some of my favourite features away. I enjoyed seeing when we met at the bottom of my profile but I can live without it if it means new people aren't put off joining us. Being able to browse other people's @mentions was interesting as well (and great for someone nosey like me) but in the loose interests of privacy I guess it's ok to hide them away.
I can look over these changes because we've had a (fail) whale of a time. You've kept me informed with every piece of breaking news as it happens. You told me about a plane in the Hudson River and the death of Osama Bin Laden. You've even took me to two Space Shuttle launches last year as part of #NASAsocial and it is you that keeps me in touch with the amazing people I met there. Finally you were the one that showed me the advert for the job that allowed me to move down to London and move in with my girlfriend.
But lately things have changed. I understand the business sense behind hiding what app I tweet from but when I ran my student paper's account I felt tweeting through a custom app gave us an air of technical proficiency. What really makes me think that it may be time to part ways is how trigger happy you have become when it comes to suspending accounts.
First you take away the account of a fellow journalist over revealing an email address that we could have guessed anyway. Then you suspend the hilarious @essexlion for no reason what so ever (before reinstating it later). But now you have warned an account called @Twisst that you believe it is spam.
Many people have never heard of @Twisst, but the idea behind it encompasses one of the reasons you are great. Until today if I followed @Twisst it would look at where I am and tweet me when I have an opportunity to watch the International Space Station fly over. Nearly 50,000 people use the account and this isn't something built by NASA using thousands of taxpayers' dollars. This was built by a journalist in the Netherlands with the simple aim of making it easier to see the awe inspiring sight of six human beings hurtling around the earth at 17,500 miles an hour in a lump of metal as big as a football pitch, with your naked eye. I was built for Twitter because you were simple, open and allowed people like Jaap Meijers to build little tools like this.
I beg you Twitter, allow @Twisst to carry on doing what it does, your service might need to sort out the spambots but any human being can see that this is certainly not one of them. This is an account that can inspire the next generation of scientists, space geeks, programmers. This is an account that if not reinstated, could cause more of us to start cheating on you with App.net.
Yours faithfully,
Jack Dearlove
#savetwisst.