In June, the business-themed social network LinkedIn announced that its users would not be able to publish their Twitter messages to their LinkedIn profile anymore. This was due to Twitter"s decision to tighten up how third party apps and websites use its APIs. Today, Twitter gave some more information on its plans, and it could be bad news for a number of third party apps.
In a post on Twitter"s developer blog, the company announced that it would launch version 1.1 of its API sometime in the coming weeks. When it is released, third party Twitter apps that have more than 100,000 users will be able to increase those numbers to 200 percent of what they currently have. After that, they won"t be able to add any more users without Twitter"s permission. Any third party app that currently has less than 100,000 users won"t be able to expand more than that number without the thumbs up from Twitter.
Third party Twitter clients that are pre-installed on a smartphone, PC, TV, or other electronic device will also need Twitter"s consent before going forward. Twitter"s blog says:
Due to the long lead time required to update pre-installed client applications once they"re "in the wild", we want to make sure that the developer is providing the best Twitter experience possible — before the application ships. If you ship an application pre-installed without it being certified by Twitter, we reserve the right to revoke your application key.
The company seems to especially frown upon third party clients that Twitter feels come too close to what Twitter already offers. Specific clients such as Tweetbot and Echofon were specifically mentioned in the blog post. Twitter stated, "Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience."
The end result of all of these changes is that third parties might not even bother anymore linking their software to Twitter as the company seem determined to keep its "tweets" and its services to themselves.
Source: Twitter developer blog