I normally try to steer clear of blatant self promotion around here, but this Gizmodo post Matt Buchanan wrote about Birdfeed, the Twitter client Neven Mrgan and I built, really makes me happy. I like to think of Birdfeed as the Velvet Underground of Twitter clients: it wasn’t a huge success outside of a devoted cult, but you can see its influence on a lot of iOS software today (I’m pretty sure we were the first to use a user profile design that has now become pretty much standard in iOS social apps, for example).

People tend to focus a lot on UI novelty in iOS apps these days, and if I had been a little more open to embracing whiz bang interactions Birdfeed probably would have been more competitive (we had the idea for “pull to refresh” months before it showed up in Tweetie, for example, but I nixed it because I felt it was too gimmicky). Unfortunately, I think what the people who really loved Birdfeed responded to was something that’s tricky to market: it was simple, clean but visually appealing, iOS-like, and it had a very clear and consistent mental model. Like Matt, I still miss it every day.