This maybe wild conjecture but I think the crux of the issue is that Twitter feels that developers of third-party apps "owe them something". After all, even be

This maybe wild conjecture but I think the crux of the issue is that Twitter feels that developers of third-party apps "owe them something". After all, even before Tweetie the Twitter apps were generating profits for many small companies before Twitter generated any significant revenue. The problem with Twitter is that they provide an infrastructure service without owning infrastructure but paying all the costs to provide it (aside from bandwidth consumed by users). If Twitter's going to go with this API tokens implementation I think they should stop this love/hate relationship with third-party developers and tax them per token. As long as it's a reasonable fee and not prohibitive, third-party devs should be happy to pay. This 100,000 users cap is both arbitrary and prohibitive for startups targeting growth.