[eaxbin]

I both understand and don't understand.

WHy don't they "just" serve ads using the API as well? And ad a line in the EULA saying something like: "Not showing these ads will mean termination of your Developer Account" or something like that

[hboon]

Looking at the product as it is now, offering an API for third party app developers that clones the primary timeline browsing experience is a no-no because Twitter gives up control over how they can craft their product experience. For example, look at their official app's Discover tab. They can't offer something like that and iterate quickly easily across all apps.

Serving ads through the API alone also limits ads delivery. For eg., they might want to display full screen video ads like how iAds does it. Or they even want to do something even more fancy (remember the dick bar? Imagine if there was no third party Twitter apps when they launched it). Without complete control, it's hard.

In a way, they are at stage 2 of their evolution, stage 1 was iterating on their core product, now they need to iterate on their business model.

PS: I'm the developer for SimplyTweet. I'm biased, but I can imagine where they might be coming from, even though I'm not happy about it.