Twitter Lays Down the Law, Third-Party Clients Need to Watch Out

Twitter is putting its foot down when it comes to third-party apps in the ecosystem. What began almost a year ago, when Twitter aggressively started to create its own Twitter clients for various platforms, an updated terms of service for developers basically shuts down all opportunity for third-parties to create clients that reproduce "mainstream" Twitter experience.

In an email posted on Twitter's developer forum, Platform lead Ryan Sarver has removed any ambiguities or misinterpretations of Twitter's stance on third-party clients, basically, it wants them gone.

"Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no," he writes bluntly.

Not that there were that many developers trying to get in the game at this stage, there are already too many Twitter clients and even the most popular ones have a small market share.

As for existing clients, they can continue to operate, but they have to abide by the much stricter terms of service. Specifically, they have to respect user privacy, use Twitter 'approved' terminology and function in a way that is consistent with the official apps.

Apparently, Twitter users are so easily confused that any app that does anything different that Twitter must be eliminated. This because, there can be only one way of doing things and the possibility that, although different, an approach by a third-party client may be better is non-existent.

"As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way. This is already happening organically - the number and market share of consumer client apps that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking. According to our data, 90% of active Twitter users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis," Sarver writes.

Apart from the website, Twitter now has official apps for all major platforms, it has a Mac client as well as iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone apps. The BlackBerry app was created in collaboration with Twitter as well. The company says that the top five ways people access the service come from Twitter.