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Comment by jot | Hacker News Reader

I'm impressed with their positivity but then they have effectively just been granted a monopoly.

They're basically telling people not to worry, everyone should still buy their app, because they're not going to be shutting it down in the near future. This is done purely in order to sustain their sales, and likely incidentally to ease their relationship with Twitter as they help diffuse some of Twitter's bad PR pressure. Don't mistake this for an indication of a lack of panic at their offices.

That's just wrong. According to a test – admittedly somewhat unscientific, but good enough for our purposes – done by developer Benjamin Mayo and vetted by TNW, third-party apps only contribute to ~25% of twitter's activity. Tweetbot is in the upper echelons of that 25%, but it's not even in the top 10 overall.

I'm sure they do well, but they definitely don't have a monopoly.

Sources: http://benjaminmayo.co.uk/how-many-people-use-twitter-s-own-...

http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/07/23/only-an-estimated-2...

...how have they been granted a monopoly?

"Monopoly" is too strong a word, but "advantage" is not quite strong enough. In short, new Twitter apps will have a cap of 100k user tokens, while Tweetbot gets 2x their current number of tokens (hypothetically, if they have 400k users now, they get 800k tokens). A new developer will never be able to get 800k tokens while the new rules stand.

Of course, there's nothing to stop Twitter from creating new new rules that kill Tweetbot or remove the advantage.

Is it really an advantage? I know Tweetbot is the cool kid among the Twitter clients nowadays but others have been around a lot longer and I would assume have many more users (even if those users aren't still using the client).

> A new developer will never be able to get 800k tokens while the new rules stand.

What makes you think that?

Twitter didn't set a hard limit of 100K tokens for all new apps. That's just the initial limit. You can request more, and I assume they would grant them to popular, legitimate apps.

It will be difficult however for "traditional" clients to get deals for more than 100k tokens.

Where was this stated?

> That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, "traditional" Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience."And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api

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