Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Twitter To Ecosystem: Seriously, Stop Making Apps

dick costolo

Twitter seems to be doing everything it can to make life miserable for the startups that make the apps you use to access Twitter from your computer and phone.

It's all because Twitter is switching from something called xAuth to oAuth. We'll stay out of the weeds.

Bascially, to get access to a user's direct messages (like any Twitter client needs to) that Twitter client now has to direct users to a Twitter.com Web page, where the user can approve the Twitter client.

It used to be all a user had to do was input their user name and password. This was a much simpler solution.

This will make life harder for third party Twitter apps and the people who want to use them.

Some people think that's the point.

Says one Twitter-ecoystem entreprenuer, "the headline is: Twitter to Ecosystem: Seriously, Stop Making Apps."

Over on Daring Fireball, Jon Gruber is also p/o'd: "I can’t think of any reason why Twitter would force native apps through OAuth other than to create a hurdle that steers users toward Twitter’s own official native clients."

Twitter has been at war with its third-party apps for a year or so now. It just bought one of them – TweetDeck – too keep it out of the hands of Bill Gross, who'd been rolling third-party apps up into a conglomerate.

We warned apps-makers this was coming a year ago, here: Here's Who Just Got Screwed By Twitter

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Twitter To Ecosystem: Seriously, Stop Making Apps


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