Twitter is traveling a road that the industry has already been down before, and as an outside observer, it would appear that they've failed to learn from histor

Twitter is traveling a road that the industry has already been down before, and as an outside observer, it would appear that they've failed to learn from history. AIM, MSN, and the other IM networks gradually attempted to generate revenue by adding advertisements to their official clients, and additionally, did not provide clients for operating systems other than Windows (and sometimes Mac OS/Mac OS X). In addition to that, there was a significant user demand for IM clients that could connect to multiple networks at once, which was strictly contrary to the business goals of the commercial IM networks. None of the IM network protocols were public, but this didn't stop developers from reverse engineering the IM protocols and producing alternative clients, often to the chagrin and frustration of the IM network providers. There was, for a time, a small arms race between AOL and implementors of unofficial AIM clients, but invariably the 3rd party developers won. This despite the fact that the protocols were complex binary-only affairs. The modern reliance on HTTP and self-describing encodings (eg, JSON) is a significant difference from that time, and makes reverse engineering of closed protocols vastly easier. This arms race also wasn't constrained to open-source; there were a number of shareware third-party IM clients. If Twitter continues to lock down their APIs for the use of 3rd party clients, while simultaneously 'monetizing' their client while almost invariably making it less attractive to users, then it is almost certain that we'll see the emergence of clients using unsupported API, especially for the desktop, and most likely for mobile. My biggest concern on mobile is whether Apple, at the behest of Twitter, would pull unofficial clients from the App Store. This already happened to Pandora, who is engaged in a minor arms race with third-party developers. Pandora provides a poor Air-based desktop client, resulting in a number of native clients being produced for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows[1]. Pandora occasionally produces updates that break these clients, and the clients are then updated to fix the issue. [1] Pandora native clients: http://6xq.net/projects/pianobar/ http://6xq.net/projects/pianobar/ http://www.pandabarapp.com/ http://www.pandabarapp.com/ http://www.adamhaile.net/projects/elpis/ http://www.adamhaile.net/projects/elpis/