[Kylekramer]

I don't know about that. Among the early adopter crowd, it is certainly true, but Twitter much larger than that group now. Most people use Twitter from the web or from an official Twitter app. I still think Twitter is going to have very serious monetization problems, but third party clients aren't really a problem. If anything, the third parties should be concerned about hitching their wagon to a company that might not be too concerned about their success.

Reference: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/09/evolving-ecosystem.html

[code_duck]

Quite true, it's not fun at all to develop software or a business based on a platform and service that might change to make your business obsolete at anytime.

Fred Wilson, an investor in Twitter, made a post when the article you linked to came out, stating how fantastic he thought it was that Twitter was screwing over their third party developers. A shift from 'filling in the gaps' to 'building on the platform', he thinks. This doesn't make me comfortable as I depend on a couple of other companies he is involved with.