The way I see it, third party applications increase the value of using twitter, bringing more users to it. Twitter as a social sharing tool has very little valu

The way I see it, third party applications increase the value of using twitter, bringing more users to it. Twitter as a social sharing tool has very little value to me, personally, but as a chat tool, marketing tool, or customer support tool I think it has a lot of potential. Its presentation/UX is not very optimized for those experiences, though -- and that's why third party apps exist. If an open source project builds its chatroom on top of twitter, that's a huge value-add and would bring people to use twitter in order to efficiently communicate with the company, in the same way people use Slack because companies host their support on it. By the way, I think their rate limiting is fine for most third party apps. There is a lot that can be done with intermediate caching and the Streaming API.