To put it bluntly, I’m rather stunned by a majority of the reaction to the release of Twitterrific 3.0 this morning by The Iconfactory. The two things which are creating controversy include the decision to include ads in the application, and the new registration structure put in place by the Iconfactory team.

The list of recent tweets showing up in the application are currently packed with mixed emotion by the introduction of ads. To say the least, I’m quite disappointed with the reaction by some people as outlined below.

Adverts

The ads are provided by an exclusive advertising service called The Deck. The Deck ads are run on just twenty sites, and reach millions of users a month.

There’s nothing more to say other than ads run on The Deck are elegant. They have to be. The audience of the sites they’re run on silently demand them to be. Check out some of the current advertisers and their ads here.

Twitterrific has gone from a fun side project to a full-fledged application that is enjoyed by tens of thousands of users every day. This growing user base reports bugs, requests new feature sets and regularly sends support questions. All of these things take time, and ultimately money, to make a reality.

Adding inline advertising via The Deck allows us to keep the app “free” without crippling any of its features. Hope you can understand our point of view. Thanks for listening.

These ads are displayed at the rate of one per hour in-line with tweets from your contacts. If you’ve got more than a few dozen friends on Twitter you’ll hardly notice them. Not that they’re actually a problem, I find myself clicking on them quite often as the content is attractive. One of the pluses of running with The Deck.

Those users who prefer to run Twitterrific ad-free can choose to register the program for $14.95.

Read that statement closely. The users who prefer to run ad free. There’s no expectation for you to purchase it. There’s no limitation of how many days you can run the application for before needing to purchase it, and there’s no features locked out from users who haven’t purchased it.

Twitterrific 3.0 can be used completely free of charge if you wish. Registering simply eliminates advertising from the tweet timeline. The option to register the application removes the one advertisement per hour from the stream of tweets - nothing more, nothing less.

Recurring

Highly regarded as a tool which makes Twitter worth using, tens of thousands of Mac users run Twitterrific around the clock. On my Mac Pro, it’s running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That can’t be said about many other applications.

After a quick glance at my dock looking at which applications have been open for some time, the majority cost money to register. NewsFire, Transmit, MarsEdit, Aperture, Xtorrent - all of these applications cost to register, and in my instance, many are used less than Twitterrific (while costing more).

I don’t have a problem paying for an application to support the developers, regardless of if it was originally released freely or not. If a company is constantly putting out new versions to an application you spend a lot of time using, a small fee to help out with future versions/features is a small price to pay. After-all, the life of a Mac developer is a lot of hard work.