How can a company who's user base has grown to such an amount because of third party clients say something like this? Talk about showing a little appreciation. As someone who develops a Twitter client, it is a huge kick in the teeth.
"If you are an existing developer of client apps, you can continue to serve your user base, but we will be holding you to high standards to ensure you do not violate users' privacy, that you provide consistency in the user experience, and that you rigorously adhere to all areas of our Terms of Service."
Translation: "we will be looking very hard for any excuse to shut down existing unofficial Twitter clients."
Wether or not that backfires on them is yet to be seen.
And are they also "shoving" an extremely popular, free service with ongoing development "down your throat?" I am a fan of free software etc. (even set up a diaspora account... lol), but I don't understand how people expect businesses such as twitter to run forever without a viable revenue stream.
Of course, they shouldn't kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but after a while you have to wonder if these eggs aren't just tin someone took a can of spray paint to! What "gold"? Tons of users are nice insofar as they lead to money. Users are not an end in themselves.
Sorry for the rant but please, people, stop acting like twitter owes you something. (My comments are vis-a-vis users, I do think what they are doing to developers is not right, from a courtesy point of view.)
If you're going to roll on new draconian policies, have the balls just to lay it down as it is. Not wrap it up as if they're doing the developer community a favor when clearly no developers have been asking this at all!.
(Yeah, I know that 'we've been asked' is usual a PR spin mechanism, it's just a shitty way to communicating with people)
Sometimes the model turns out to be inefficient and unsustainable, and such companies are crushed by more open competitors, but not always.
If you ask me, that's actually worse. Why such ambiguity? It is pretty apparent Twitter is no fan of clients because of revenue reasons. They will do all of us a service by clearly acknowledging that and simply banning apps of specific nature.
It would sting, sure, but I'd respect a company openly stating financial realities versus a company giving developers a runaround.
That's why it feels so wrong.