[ziadbc]

Twitter wants to give you access to the data. Their client is their main product. Thus, every 3rd party client is competing with their main product, that seems to be a fact.

Theres no way to stop you from building one anyway, twitter knows that. If you go against their rules, you're a revolutionary, and if you win that revolution, they'll have to deal with you.

You can't expect however, that the incumbent is going to go around encouraging revolutions against themselves.

The only alternative is to encourage everyone to make clients, at which point, they're just a big cloud xmpp server to the world.

[sillysaurus]

Twitter had better take a long, hard look at Joel's old essay on Platforms: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html

Declaring war on your third-party developers is shortsighted at best, fatal at worst.

[iandanforth]

Perhaps there is a class of people who pay for email apps. I'm not one of them. I don't see twitter as a platform, or at least don't use it as one. It is a communication medium which, for all my usage, could have no developer ecosystem.

Professionally I would love to have free access to the Firehose, that's some juicy data. But as a consumer Twitter 'apps' are no more worth my money than email apps.

[andrewfelix]

>Their client is their main product

Is it? Their revenue stream will be coming from paid tweets, so aren't the tweets themselves their main product?

It seems grossly unfair that they punish other 3rd party clients who are doing exactly what Tweetie were doing 2 years ago.

[Spooky23]

The data is their real product.