14 DAY TRIAL // Sad news for all the Tweetbot alpha users out there enjoying an enhanced Twitter experience on their Mac – Tapbots is pulling the alpha because of new rules set in place by the people at Twitter Inc.
Twitter’s latest API (application programming interface) changes are forcing third-party Twitter client developers to put a cap on the number of users they’re routing.
Although Tapbots did try to work something out with the black suits behind the popular micro-blogging service, all discussions failed. They now get a limited number of “tokens” (users) until the final version is ready for deployment.
Tapbots laments on its blog, “As some of you may have already noticed the download link for the Tweetbot for Mac alpha no longer works. Twitter’s latest API Changes means now we have a large but finite limit on the number of user tokens we can get for Tweetbot for Mac.”
“We’ve been working with Twitter over the last few days to try to work around this limit for the duration of the beta but have been unable to come up with a solution that was acceptable to them. Because of this we’ve decided its best for us to pull the alpha,” says the company.
The developer clarifies for all testers that August 16th 2012 3rd marks the end of unlimited third-party Twitter client tokens.
It’s either 100,000 or 2 times that in case the number had already exceeded 100k on that particular date.
Non client applications aren’t restricted (i.e. those which only boast Twitter integration, among other things), and users who log in to the same account with the same application on multiple devices will only take up a single token (which is good).
It is unclear whether Tapbots is encouraging lazy testers to forgo their token, but the company clearly states that, “If you go on the Twitter website and navigate to Settings -> Apps and hit the ‘Revoke access’ button you are returning one of those tokens back to the app’s pool.”