Twitter To Devs: Go Away

As we’ve been discussing, Twitter has been pushing new techniques to get revenue out of the site, including the #dickbar, of course, and now it seems like they’re clamping down on third party Twitter apps. We’ve seen them go after a few specific Twitter clients in the past but their rhetoric is getting blunter. Apparently, Twitter told developers that they can make third party clients but they will have strict privacy and consistency standards. They then stated:

Developers have told us that they’d like more guidance from us about the best opportunities to build on Twitter. More specifically, developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.

According to Twitter, 90% of users use the official Twitter apps. I don’t know about you but I use third party apps on both my PC and phone and the Twitter Windows Phone app is lacking features that the third party apps have. If we only had the official app I’d probably move back to relying on RSS feeds a bit more. You