Snippet: Twitter Officially Hates Third-Party Clients ☇

Michael Sippey posts another one of those cheesy rules-of-the-road, we’re-trying-to-be-friendly-but-hate-you-all things on Twitter’s blog explaining the changes that would affect some favorite third-party applications like Tweetbot, Twitterrific, and Echofon:

One of the key things we’ve learned over the past few years is that when developers begin to demand an increasingly high volume of API calls, we can guide them toward areas of value for users and their businesses. To that end, and similar to some other companies, we will require you to work with us directly if you believe your application will need more than one million individual user tokens.

Additionally, if you are building a Twitter client application that is accessing the home timeline, account settings or direct messages API endpoints (typically used by traditional client applications) or are using our User Streams product, you will need our permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.

We will not be shutting down client applications that use those endpoints and are currently over those token limits. If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you’ll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you’ll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission.

These apps have six months to comply with these new rules. Anyone else think with limited user growth, these developers will eventually move on to projects which don’t have a capped amount of potential customers?