It’s a normal day, and as usual, an innocuous tweet sends me into a spiral of links.
Fine, I forgive Alyssa Milano for that whole Tweetie 2 thing. https://t.co/Qr41iFyTQ0
— Guy English (@gte) February 10, 2017
Alyssa Milano? Tweetie 2? What’s all that about?
One quick Google search later leads us to this Business Insider article, from 2009:
“B-list bombshell Alyssa Milano, a self-professed Twitter addict, is also apparently a cheapskate. And it has the iPhone nerds very amused.
Yesterday, after finding out that Tweetie 2, a major update to the popular iPhone Twitter app, would cost $2.99, she tweeted: “Boooooo!!!”
This triggered a bit of an uproar from the iPhone developer community, half-amused and half-angered that a celebrity would be such a cheapskate to complain about paying $3 for a software app she could end up using for hours a week. (And that an independent programmer just spent months working on.)”
Ah.
“Responding to someone else’s complaint about the upgrade price, Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber made two solid points:
- If you don’t think it’s worth $3, don’t buy it.
- Keep in mind we’re talking about $3 for an app that only runs on handheld devices that cost at least $200, most of which come with a $70/month service.
Both valid. And, seriously… it’s just $3!”
Oooh, what’s that, a Daring Fireball link? What else did John Gruber have to say about the subject?1
“Jeff LaMarche has a sharp response to this goofy rant by Patrick Jordan complaining that the upcoming Tweetie 2, which costs just $3, is not a free upgrade for existing users.”
Excellent, a goofy rant to laugh at:
“My thought is that this is a very,very,very Bad Call. I just can ‘t find a way to think of this as anything less than spitting in the face of existing Tweetie users.”
Your article is bad and you should feel bad.
Enough of that nonsense. Let’s read Jeff LaMarche’s rebuttal post:
“Blog has been removed
Sorry, the blog at iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.”
For fuck’s sake.
OK, OK, so you can read Jeff’s post via the Wayback Machine. And seeing as that post is called “A Sense of Entitlement”, I guess I have to be really careful about what I say next.
So I’ll just say this: it’s really, really annoying when a badly-written piece of tosh manages to stay online, and a thorough and well-reasoned argument ends up being deleted. God knows the world needs more well-argued pieces, and less goofy rants. For the crap piece to survive and the good piece to fall offline just feels fundamentally wrong.
Think about what you leave behind. At first glance this looks like a silly story… but it touches on issues of real importance about paying developers for their work. That’s a topic which is well worth looking back on, and very little has changed today. Don’t delete your part of the story.
Otherwise, you risk leaving the public record to just be a series of goofy rants.
Placement of link adjusted for readability. ↩