Tweeters the world over may have to adjust the way they go about populating the streams of Earth’s biggest micro-blog. Twitter has not so much declared war on third-party apps that allow you to update and manage your user experience, rather they’ve fired a warning shot.
Many of us use services such as TweetDeck, HootSuite, CoTweet and the like to effectively filter the content we are presented with, and keep us alerted to certain keywords and phrases. But with the massive surge in users and usage [over the last year the number of Tweets per day has grown from 48m to 140m], Twitter are now changing their policy and an advising would be Twitter client app builders to focus their efforts elsewhere.
Ubermedia, which owns many such clients, was cut off from Twitter’s service for violating its terms of use. The justification for a policy change to regulate the way people use the service was that Twitter already had the lion’s share of the users, as 90% of them use Twitter through official applications, although other sources suggest this figure could be nearer 50%.
This mooted change in policy has angered many, with the externally developed clients claiming that Twitter isn’t recognising the value they add to the service. Comments left on Ryan Sarver’s [Twitter’s coding chief] blog posting described the idea as “chilling”, while others paraphrased it as: “Thanks for getting so many people interested in Twitter. Now get lost”.
For more details on this story, read the BBC News article here and read Ryan Sarver’s blog post and comments in their entirety here.