As some of you may know, I use a little service called Twitter to do something that you might call micro-blogging. (Besides my Twitter profile, recent "tweets", as entries are called, also show up on the sidebar of the FuzzyCo home page.) It's easy enough to use the web interface, but I also use a Mac desktop client called Twitterific. It's a $15 app, or you can use it for free in a mode where it will display an ad once an hour.

I had a great experience with Twitterific customer service just before Christmas -- I wrote in with what I thought was a feature request and I noted in my email that they could feel free to ignore my request since I wasn't one of their paying customers--I was still using the free, ad-ridden version. I had a friendly email back from them in minutes pointing out that the feature already existed and where in the preferences I could activate it. I promised myself that once we were past the holidays and present-buying, I would go ahead and register the app.

So it was an oddly good thing today when John Gruber pointed out that some jagmo was publicizing a hack to disable the ads in the free version of Twitterific. It's terrible that this jerk is trying to steal food out of the mouths of the developers of Twitterific*, but it's good because it reminded me to get off my butt and fulfill my promise.

* All of whom are orphans who live in an eco-friendly commune.**
** Not actually true, but Icon Factory really is an odd target for a "they're the man, keeping us down" rant.