So it appears that Twitter is starting to make good on their Consistent Experience initaitive announced a while back. With this they are starting to alienate their existing developer base - the user base will take a longer time to notice (if at all.) The so-called ”Developer Rules of The Road” spell this out nicely.

From Twitters perspective this will ensure that their users see the same experience on whatever platform and within every application, something which is laudable but probably not that useful. Sites and applications that have to look the same and present the information in exactly the same way are going to find it hard to differentiate themselves or will end up just looking like the existing Twitter web interface. Likely this will mean that developers will just stop bothering and the choices will reduce.

Twitter are also starting to introduce their Cards concept - which is a way of trying to compete with Facebook apps. Personally I can’t see the point. I don’t go to Twitter to do anything more than read status updates, why would I use any apps? I guess time will tell though. The quality of the apps produced will determine whether anyone uses them or not - I just hope they’re not going to be clones of Zynga and other games. That would simply make Twitter a me-too ecosystem rather than anything special. This would hasten its demise.

One of the bigger changes is that once an app reaches 100,000 users that they then require Twitters permission to add more. For most indie developers this probably won’t be a problem but it has a big impact on existing mainstream apps. There is a concession for these though, if they currently have 100,000+ users then they can double their userbase before this rule will be enforced.

The next impact is on the way Tweets are to be displayed. Apps must enforce the links within the tweets - especially those to profile pages and also that the actions associated with Tweets must be shown. This is clearly intended to drive traffic towards the main Twitter site presumably for advertising revenues at least in the short term. This is going to have a real impact on how aggregator systems can interact with Tweets. This post talks about these impacts in some detail.

I believe that these changes are going to do two things: 1) limit 3rd party client development, 2) make some developers embrace the Cards concept in order to continue playing. Perhaps it is this second point that Twitter are trying to leverage with these changes. Only time will tell. We’ve got six months, and the clock is ticking.

So, is there anything to really panic about? Well, it depends. For those of us developing small apps that are scratching a personal itch then possibly not - as long as we continue to stay below the Twitter radar. For those trying to build systems and services leveraging a number of social eco-systems then it probably means quite a big difference. These new twitter rules appear to prohibit the ability for aggregators to combine information from disperate sources with Twitter data.

While we wait to see how things pan out I might just take a look at App.net

Related Posts

• Delivering a consisten twitter experience
• Twitter Calls Everybody Back To The Twitter Mothership
• Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead
• Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes
• Twitter sets max user caps for 3rd party clients, tightens API rules to direct users to official apps
• What Twitter’s API Announcement Could Have Said
• Twitter needs to get their shit together
• Twitter Gives Devs 6 Months To Display Tweets Properly, Use New Authentication and Rate Limits