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You’re a developer. You work your arse off to make a rock-solid product and charge a modest fee for people to use it, like the awesome Tweetbot for instance. So you’re annoyed when people pirate the hell out of it. So, what do you do? Hilarious, forced, self public naming and shaming, of course.
Tweetbot is probably the best Twitter client out there, and it’s available for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. But it’s quite pricey, mainly because of Twitter’s cap on the number of users a third-party Twitter client can have now. So, people are apparently pirating it, and at the same time, using up tokens bringing Tapbots closer to the Twitter cut-off threshold.
So, what did Tapbots decide to do? Force Suggest pirating users to post this little snippet to their Twitter streams:
“I’ve been demoing a pirated copy of @tweetbot and really like it so I’m going to buy a copy!”
In fact, a quick search on Twitter shows an absolute butt-load of people unintentionally spamming twitter with their confessions of piracy. Yeah, you can moan about piracy as a developer, and you probably can’t really do anything about it in the long run, but humorously naming and shaming is simply brilliant. Hats off Tapbots. If I wasn’t already a Tweetbot user, I’d probably buy it, just for that.
Hat tip to Charles Arthur
Update: Tapbots got in touch to say that it doesn’t actually force users to post the piracy confession, it just autofills the tweet box for people to hit the post button themselves. Why would anyone do that? Stupidity according to Tapbots’ Paul Haddad, and I’m inclined to agree. Bizarre.
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My bet is that about half the people this is affecting actually paid for it.
Is it quite pricey or a modest fee….not really the same thing surely?
Well, Tweetbot on iOS isn’t too bad, it’s just the Mac app that’s pricey
Dunno who to laff at more. TweetBot for their £14 price tag, the gullibles for officially buying it, or those who pirated it because it was £14 and wanted it for free.
Go get TweetDeck.
…apparently you’ve never bought and used TweetBot. It’s a fantastic app; stable, usable, beautiful.
Here’s how you defeat piracy. Make a product that people want to buy and make it better than what the pirates are offering.
Anyone who is not constantly evolving and improving their product through proper innovation (that does not include whinging about ‘big bad pirates’) does not deserve success or my money.
Huh? So for TweetBot to beat pirates they’ve got to make better software than their own software?
Lets make this clear this is *their* software stolen, activation (or whatever checking) removed then distributed for free, your master solution on how you defeat piracy makes no sense.
Any popular app will have this happen no matter what new features they add or as you say constantly evolve, the next version will be cracked too. This is a fun way of guilting the pirated users into buying it, its not intended to outright defeat piracy, because frankly even Microsoft can’t stop it with Windows for example.
Hold on a minute, this is okay, but we don’t name and shame people who are too cheap to PAY for a £9.99 music CD?
Well it is a £14 twitter app.
That’s a pretty long list though innit.