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Comment by jimisir | Hacker News Reader

i'm not necessarily talking about any specific apps per se. My understanding of their rule is that you cannot create third party apps that mimic the twitter user experience. Now this experience is going to involve photo-sharing which developers might have spent a long time creating but now might not be able to continue work on it.

I'm also concerned about what other features they might create that might infringe upon what a developer thought at the time was not a direct user experience on twitter...

In the end, I'm more interested in seeing how it all plays out. I like twitter and I'm pretty sure developers will continue to find innovative ways of using their rich data

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There is no rule that you can't create apps that "mimic the Twitter user experience". You have them confused with Apple. What there is is advice from Twitter that such apps are not a good bet, because Twitter is aggressively promoting their own apps and has no compunction about making changes that advantage their apps and disadvantage third party apps.

What other features might they create? Who knows? They're clearly going to bake in anything that makes sense for Twitter-the-business. That's a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't think you're right that Twitter is particularly dependent on third-party apps. I think we talk in a geek echo chamber that is particularly enthralled with apps, and with the best possible Twitter clients, but that most of Twitter's users --- and, in particular, Twitter's most lucrative users --- could give a flying whale about them. But they do need to share links and photos.

haha, i like the analogy with the whale.

But I don't think twitter is dependent on third party apps. I just feel that as an organization you can't necessarily think about and implement every single permutation of features that can be created with your data. Obviously it's your data and you reserve the right to release or not release it as you please.

Thanks for pointing out my erroneous assumption though. I just thought that if there are restrictions to what you can create and twitter obviously would keep adding new features to the product, it's not enough incentive for you as a developer to create twitter clients. But like you clearly pointed out, their most lucrative users might not really care about them. We agree to disagree

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