Twitter has announced that it is making substantial, and extraordinarily unwelcome, changes to way it allows third party apps, like the awesome Tweetbot app, to access its services. According to new guidelines, third party developers of Twitter clients will have to work closely with Twitter itself to obtain permission to access their services if they have a large number of users. This number is being limited to 100,000 in the first instance, but if an app developer obtains permission and already has 100,000 users then it can be increased to up to 200,000.
What this essentially does, therefore, is for every given app, the limit of the amount of users it can have is 200,000 which makes it very difficult and puts a very strict cap on how many users an app like Tweetbot can ever have. The other bitter pill to swallow is that, because the official Twitter client is so bad, it’s a weird way of forcing users into a client they don’t want to use.
To be honest, Twitter is such a stellar concept that rather than implementing these archaic measures on third party app developers, perhaps it would be an idea to considering charging for the service. For example, instead of restricting the maximum number of third party app users to 100,000, why not charge a couple of bucks for it. Given how much many people use Twitter, they would perhaps be more amenable to paying for the service and using their own Twitter client, rather than having it free and using the official Twitter client, the experience of which, is comparable to drunken texting.
You can read the announcement here.
Twitter just got strict.
Send A Drunk Text And…