(2011-03-11) Twitter Shrinking Ecosystem

Ryan Sarver of Twitter posted a roadmap for the Platform, basically firing a shot across the bow of Twitter Client developers. This came right after the hoopla around their Dick Bar announcement. (Free Lunch)

• Dave Winer summarizes it a bit more.

Update: Dave Winer gives his preferred RSS-based roadmap, point out his Sept'2010 series on rebooting RSS. (See also 2011-01-05-WinerMinimalBloggingTool.

Mar17 update: Dave Winer notes some fresh discussion about their API Terms Of Service, which just changed. "You may not use Twitter Content or other data collected from end users of your Client to create or maintain a separate status update or social network database or service." He thinks this means: If your client touches the Twitter API, then any text or data the user enters into that app becomes Twitter Content... You cannot use that data to form a new service. So there goes the idea of Twitter clients sharing info between each other using RSS.

• I Commented to wonder whether they could distinguish a rogue client from a "real" client. I foresee battles like the games to block multi-protocol IM clients....

  • Mark Bernstein noted that you need an API-key, so that's their choke-point to block you.

  • web-scraping time?