[hendzen]

The "ecosystem" was on the path to destroying the company. The 3rd party Twitter clients had huge chunks of the Twitter userbase - back in 2010-2011, 20% of Twitter users used EchoFon, 11% used TweetDeck, etc.

If they had let the system continue, one of the clients could have gotten enough market share that they could have simply changed the backend to their own app, and none of the users would have batted an eye. Or Facebook could have bought up 2-3 of them quietly then forced Twitter to sell on the cheap.

It's easy to romanticize the wild-west period of Twitter's API being completely open for all use cases. However, it was, from a strategic perspective, extremely dangerous to the company's future - there's a reason why companies now know to build walled gardens.