Twitter Cripples Third-Party Clients…Again:
Photo by malsawn on PixabayTwitter has spent years fighting the third-party clients the company once encouraged. Despite protests from developers and users (see "Twitter App Developers Band Together to Fight API Changes," 21 May 2018), Twitter has gone ahead with its latest restrictions on third-party clients. Clients can no longer live-stream tweets or send push notifications. If you want those features, you now must turn to Twitter's official apps. But while it's cutting out outside developers, Twitter has a bad record of maintaining its own clients, having killed off its own Mac app months ago (see "Three Alternatives to Twitter's Now-Defunct Mac App," 2 March 2018). Twitter's Rob Johnson shared an internal email on Twitter, along with other comments intended to placate users, but based on Michael Tsai's sampling of responses, Johnson's explanations fell flat.
(Via TidBITS)
Twitter has its reasons. We don't know what they are. Their business plan should account for the bad press, damage to their reputation for some recent decisions, and "influencers" who will abandon the platform.
I look forward to reading the almost certainly in process analyses of Twitter's decisions.
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