TweetStation.txt

TweetStation is a twitter client designed to elevate the level of
discourse on Twitter, reduce your stress levels and help you become
a better Twetizen.

It has all the features that you expect from a twitter client so I
will not bother you with a blow-by-blow feature list.

At a conceptual level, this is achieved by applying the cardinal rule
of not taking anything too seriously, specially any interactions you
might have online.

At a practical level this is achieved with two features.  The first
feature plays back chicken noises whenever you request more Tweets.
The chicken noises have been engineered to remind you that no matter
how important an argument appears to be in Twitter, you should not
take it too seriously.

When you compose a message with TweetStation music starts playing back
in the background.  This music was specially selected to elicit in you
the desire to write a witty and clever response.  The kind of tweet
that your local newspaper would publish in the front page, or in their
"Social Media Expert" column.

But there is an elephant in the room, and I want to speak directly
about it.  Many Twitteristas are concerned about the Tweetpocalypse
and Twitter's transition to use some bizarro world non-feature called
OAuth.   

Tweetstation is feature packed and does not suffer from either
problem.  You can trust that Tweetstation was developed using the best
engineering techniques available today, and that you will never be the
victim of the Tweetpocalypse and be left incommunicado due to some
silly programming mistake.  Not in this 32-bit century, not in the
next, and not under my watch.  If my years of experience taught me one
thing is and one thing only, it is when to use a 32-bit integer data
type and when to use a 64-bit one.  Do not fear dear user, I also
master many other data types, but I digress.

But you might be wondering, why another Twitter client, and why now?
As a twitterista you know that there is a special bond, an intimate
bond if you will, between the twitterista and his twitter client.
This bond can exist as long as both the twitterista and the twitter
client grow hand in hand, if they co-develop.  And I found myself at
odds with the design decisions and paths that other twitter clients
were taking.  In a metaphorical way, I felt uncomfortable, like a
Woody Allen character under pressure.  But a character that lacked
Woody Allen's command of the language.

And this is how TweetStation was born, it was a labor of love, but
mostly of social awkwardness when my friends mocked my Twitter client
for lacking a chicken noise, or when they suggested things at dinner
like "would it not be cool if...".  I decided to change all that, and
make sure that other twitteristas in the future did not feel the
social scorn that I had gone through, and this is why TweetStation's
source code is open source.  

So I invite TweetStation users to improve it, modify it, blend it and
reuse it in any form they see fit to fulfill their childhood dreams of
writing a twitter client.

Miguel de Icaza, Boston, MA.   May 31st, 2010