Snippet: Twitter’s API Changes ☇

It seems like things might eventually get bad for those of us who enjoy third-party Twitter clients, according to The Verge, especially since it all comes down to money:

Twitter won’t become a walled garden disconnected to the open web. But the company leadership does believe the best way to attract big brand advertisers and create meaningful revenue is to adopt a closed ecosystem, similar to Facebook, in which users access the service mainly through the company’s website and mobile apps, rather than third party clients. The company doesn’t want to deal with fragmentation across different services, where it would have to work with API partners to ensure advertising and rich media was being properly displayed. This would become increasingly challenging, as sources familiar with Twitter’s plans say that it’s hoping to bring a number of new services into the Twitter stream, everything from booking a restaurant reservation to purchasing an item to playing a game…

…Third party clients are preparing for the worst. “Twitter obviously wants to make money by advertising in the stream. This will be impossible if all of the mechanisms aren’t implemented to spec within a client. They need full control of how the information is presented, and do not have the bandwidth to micromanage ads with third parties to prevent fraud, poor presentation, etc,” said Ollie Wagner, a designer for Twittelator, a third party client. “Do I think they’ll pull the plug on the API? No, not necessarily. But it may mean they’ll become so restrictive that third parties will want to pull it themselves.”