Yea, they want developers to develop content for them, and they want developers to develop traffic for them. They absolutely dont want developers to develop interesting clients and apps using for their message bus. Their guidelines on displaying tweets are getting so restrictive its pointless to develop anything resembling a client. Twitter has also proved to be spectacularly bad at building clients themselves. I haven't been able to stand any of the many iterations of their web site and their best client efforts were just bought from the 3rd party developer community and then mangled.

Twitter should seriously consider just shutting down their API to third party developers and restrict it entirely to their clients and widgets.

It would be a lot more intellectually honest thing to do versus just slowly and continuously stangling their developer community in their quest for revenue. If they just shut off the API then everyone would get the kick in the pants they need to move on to something new.

The Internet community desperately needs to figure out a way to build an open message bus + identity system + open API + server farm + spam killers using a foundation along the lines of Wikipedia.

Letting one for profit company control the Internet's message bus has proven to be a truly horrible idea. Going back to RSS and a totally decentralized system not good either.