1. What’s the consensus on In-App Twitter posting?

    With my side-project tantalisingly close to reaching 1.0, I’m looking at a few features that will appear in the 1.1 release. Whilst I’m aware that work on 1.1 features sounds a little crazy, I’m awaiting bugfixes in the API in question before I can ship - hence this extra thinking and breathing time.

    One feature that I very-much want to add in 1.1 is the sharing of items via Twitter. Back in October, I came up with a fiendishly clever way that makes selecting a third-party client and sharing the item to Twitter ludicrously easy - and I plan to make the code for this available for others to use in the not-too-distant future. (In short: with iPhone OS 3.0, you don’t need to be presented with a dumb list of clients you’ve hardcoded into the application - there’s ways to detect which clients a user has installed).

    However, over the last few weeks I’ve seen a number of applications build-in Twitter sharing. Here’s my current thinking about in-app Twitter sharing…

    Pro

    • You never leave the application in question. That eliminates any context changes, and you can easily continue working after posting the item.

    Cons

    • In-app Twitter posting requires re-entering your credentials into another application (instead of using the existing accounts).
    • Building in Twitter posting requires a significant amount of development time to mimic existing features.
    • No matter how many features you replicate in your own application, you know as a developer that users will always nitpick over your feature selection: be it URL shortening service, ability to post photos (potentially).

    So I’m curious to hear what others’ thoughts are. Obviously the UX of in-app Twitter posting is great, but given that there’s tonnes and tonnes of Twitter clients out there - at what point do you draw the line in the sand and say ‘why reinvent the wheel?’ If you’re a Tumblr user, feel free to leave an ‘Answer’ for this post - however any and all feedback is welcome via email.

    Sidenote: No OAuth discussion is required for this post. It’s purely a case of “would you rather use your preferred client, and if so why?”. I’ll add that, despite the interruption in a user’s experience, I’m still leaning to the Twitter client hand-off.

    Posted on Monday December 28th, 2009