[apgwoz]

I didn't realize Apple kept that from you, but OK. Alternative. Twitter clients normally send their user-agent as part of an API request. Twitter probably still has that data, and could check to see who sent a Tweet from Tweetie between a given period of time. Is there the possibility of false positives? Certainly, but it's better than nothing.

[pmjordan]

but it's better than nothing

Is it? I'd be afraid of a backlash caused by some minority of users who had e.g. bought tweetie but never actually tweeted using it (just for reading tweets or whatever), had changed twitter accounts since, etc., plus the people claiming to be part of this group in an attempt to get something for free or whatever.

Realistically, they're probably going to have to do something about this much-hated "feature" for everyone anyway.

[apgwoz]

> Realistically, they're probably going to have to do something about this much-hated "feature" for everyone anyway.

The question is though, is it a feature for some? If so, how many? Twitter's audience is huge. A couple thousand vocal users might be on the minority side.

Twitter is big enough now that it's not going to be able to do anything right in the eyes of everyone. But, they have a ton of data about usage patterns, and other data we don't. I'm willing to bet that the decision to include such a "feature" was backed up by real data.

I'm sure they'll release an update to give you the ability to turn off the "feature" of course, and this whole discussion will be pointless.