Twitter to developers: no more third-party clients
Twitter will provide the primary mainstream consumer client experience on phones, computers, and other devices by which millions of people access Twitter content (tweets, trends, profiles, etc.), and send tweets. If there are too many ways to use Twitter that are inconsistent with one another, we risk diffusing the user experience.
It’s clear from Twitter’s original acquisition of Tweetie and subsequent official apps for various platforms that they’re seeking to be the definitive Twitter experience. Now they’re advising developers to stop building third-party Twitter clients and instead focus on other (more innovative) ways to use their data and APIs. Will they start denying API access to new apps they deem unworthy? I think it’s a good move for Twitter to start thinking about the user experience of their platform on third-party clients. It’ll be interesting to see how they go about doing it.