While Twitter is pretty keen about making its own interface the focus of a user’s experience, which suggests that the move will hide the branding of apps such as Hootsuite, Tweetbot, Ecofon and a host of other third-party Twitter clients used to tweet to the Twitter stream.
For instance, if you send the tweet using Hootsuite or Seesmic, the name of those apps used to appear in the expanded Twitter information. Also, it is worth noting that the change has already been enforced in Twitter’s mobile applications. “This is part of our ongoing work to simplify Tweets and emphasize the content being shared,” a Twitter spokesperson is quoted by CNET as saying.
This move follows Twitter’s recently enforced changes to its Application Programming Interface (API) v1.1 that contains stricter rules, many of which are mandatory, and governs how third-party apps access and display Twitter’s data.
Among the top API changes includes the restriction of 100,000 users. This affects all popular smartphone and desktop clients, many of which analyze the public stream of Tweets, and display trends, photos, etc. Hence, if a developer crosses the limit, Twitter allows them to double the numbers but not after that. Now developers need authentication from Twitter before having access to the API.
Amazingly though, it now looks like the social networking hub is moving away from its earlier philosophy of providing users with as much detail as possible. But fortunately in the past, you could view a significant amount of detail on a tweet by clicking a ‘Details’ button. It is speculated that this is a move by Twitter to further control how content on its website looks and gently pushing users towards using first-party apps and clients.
Additionally, the new guidelines seems to restrict common practices such as mixing Tweets with news from other sources in order to show users relevant information, and displaying Tweets and statistics in innovative ways. This would force all third-party apps to look and behave very much like the official Twitter apps and clients, thus limiting their appeal. The guidelines also seem to imply that Twitter will have much broader freedom to impose additional restrictions on third parties if their size and reach grow significantly.
On the other hand, the new API rules have been severely criticized by the developers. “I sure as hell would not build a business on Twitter, and I do not think I will even build any nontrivial features on it anymore,” said Marco Arment, a developer who created Instapaper. “And if I were in the Twitter-client business, I would start working on another product.”
As a matter of fact, the change may appear pretty small, but it seems like a clear message to developers that Twitter wants its space to be its own; no free advertising for another company that competes with its user experience.
However, the micro-blogging hub confirmed the change, which was rolled out on mobile previously and is now live on the Web, but the company said it’s just doing some housekeeping.
“This is part of our ongoing work to simplify Tweets and emphasize the content being shared,” a Twitter spokesperson informed CNET.
On the same theme, it is learnt that another popular Twitter app, Tweetbot, has decided to shutdown its alpha version testing due to the new restrictions. Its creator Tapbots announced the news today, saying the company was “been unable to come up with a solution that was acceptable” to Twitter.