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It looks to me like twitter is hurting for money, and they are trying to reduce costs by reducing API usage.

It could also be they want more ads, and 3rd party usage of the API would bypass that.

If anyone wanted to buy them, now would be a good time.

I wonder what would have happened if twitter had said all free accounts must use the twitter app or website, and pro-accounts (let's say $5/month) can use the full API with 3rd party apps?

I'm sure there would be plenty that would complain, but I would be happy to pay $5-10 a month for Twitter.

It could mean less money overall, if advertisers want to target the kind of user who would sign up for an ad-free pro account.

I never said ad-free, but I guess certain clients could block or hide those.

$5 a month would be totally worth it for a lot of people. Even with promoted tweets, etc., I think people would go for it.

Charge, but let people do whatever they want with their own data ... give them access to their full history of their own tweets and maybe some other advanced features. Meanwhile let everyone use twitter.com for free if they want.

Are you saying that unpaid Twitter users are worth more than $5-10/mo to advertisers? That's a pretty high spend.

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