They faced the prospect of aggregation of the clients via takeovers, this would have allowed the owner of the majority of the clients to change out the platform

They faced the prospect of aggregation of the clients via takeovers, this would have allowed the owner of the majority of the clients to change out the platform. I had a conversation with a private equity guy in 2009 who wanted to do this, what stopped them was the idea that twitter would ratelimit and control the interface. So there was a pretty rational fear driving Twitter to do this.