'Last week Twitter told 3rd party client developers to essentially fuck-off.' Twitter's subtext being 'we don’t want your clients using our API and diluting ou

'Last week Twitter told 3rd party client developers to essentially fuck-off.' Twitter's subtext being 'we don’t want your clients using our API and diluting our ability to advertise'. While neither of these statements are true, the concept of offering a protocol instead of an API is an interesting one. Though, the quote "open protocols are basically a gentleman's agreement" does indicate a similar issue to the one that's being projected onto Twitter. As shantanubala says, upgrading a protocol with mass adoption could be very difficult, this can then cause issues when you want to offer new services, or deprecate certain calls as they may be too complex at scale. Coordination definitely seems to be a huge issue when dealing with these open social networks. If a security issue is found in a server which can leak information, how long would it take for every server to be patched? I think a good example for this is to ask how many WordPress blogs get hacked because they're running on old copies of the code?