Twitter takes on third-party developers with strict new rules – The Verge

Twitter hopes to play nice with developers at its first mobile conference

2014-09-10T14:01:30-04:00

Twitter just announced Flight, its first mobile developer conference set for October 22nd in San Francisco. The event costs $140 to attend. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo will begin the day with a keynote, which will be followed by a series of technical sessions about "how Twitter can help you build the best mobile apps."

Twitter won't help you build just any app, however. The company has a long, storied past giving and taking from developers hoping to make the most of the Twitter platform. Some developers like Tapbots and Tweetro fought with Twitter over building their own Twitter clients, while others such as StockTwits saw their inventions sto …

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Twitpic is shutting down because Twitter killed it

2014-09-04T14:05:29-04:00

Twitter, surprisingly, never used to natively support images back in 2008 and so a new service was born: Twitpic. Various popular third-party Twitter clients supported Twitpic and it was used by thousands, but Twitter eventually added photo sharing to its service and it was clear services like Twitpic and Yfrog weren't going to last forever. Twitpic is now shutting down on September 25th, but not because it couldn't compete with Twitter's own image service - because Twitter is killing it dead.

In a blog post announcing the service closure, Twitpic's Noah Everett notes "Twitter contacted our legal demanding that we abandon our trademark applica …

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Twitter discontinuing iPhone, Android, and Air versions of TweetDeck

2013-03-04T18:40:26-05:00

TweetDeck v1.3

Twitter has announced that it will be discontinuing several TweetDeck apps in favor of the web client. The Android, iPhone, and Air-based desktop clients will all be affected; the apps will be removed from their stores in early May, and stop functioning soon after. Facebook integration will also be removed.

The apps rely on version 1.0 of Twitter's API, which has just been superseded by 1.1, and as such the company warns that performance may be sporadic until it finally stops offering the products altogether. The newer desktop clients won't be killed, though they're yet to receive an API 1.1 update.

In a blog post, the TweetDeck team says …

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New Falcon Pro for Android users locked out as app gets squeezed by Twitter token limits (update)

2013-02-23T17:25:04-05:00

Falcon Pro for Android Twitter (STOCK)

Popular Android Twitter client Falcon Pro is the latest to run afoul of Twitter's app restrictions. Earlier today, Falcon Pro's developers tweeted that it had hit the ceiling of 100,000 user tokens that Twitter's API allows for many third-party clients. That means that while people can still buy the app, new users won't be able to log in. To make things worse, running out of tokens doesn't necessarily mean 100,000 people paid for Falcon. It's listed on the Play Store as having between 10,000 and 50,000 installs, but extra tokens can be used up by things like piracy.

Guys, bad new, the Token limit has been reached sooner than expected. Gett …

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Tweetbot teases Vine integration, showing it may be easy for third-party clients to adopt

2013-01-24T21:22:34-05:00

Tweetbot 2.4

Viewing Vine videos in third-party Twitter clients isn't the best experience right now: they work, but you have to watch using an external player after following a link, whereas the official app displays them inline. From what we're seeing, though, it looks like it may not be too hard for third-party developers to integrate the new functionality in full.

Well that turned out to be not too hard. twitter.com/tapbot_paul/st…
- Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) January 25, 2013

Paul Haddad of Tapbots, creator of best-in-class iOS client Tweetbot, has tweeted a screenshot that shows Vine videos appearing in the main Twitter feed of his app. This sugge …

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Tweetro hits back at Twitter API restrictions with $9.99 Windows Store relaunch

2012-12-03T21:45:46-05:00

tweetro+ screenshot

After Twitter's imposition of strict API limitations "completely crippled" Tweetro, the popular Windows 8 client's developers have pressed reset. A new app called Tweetro+ is now available in the Windows Store for both Windows 8 and RT, but there's a catch - you'll have to pay $9.99 this time around, or $12.99 in a couple of weeks.

As with the $19.99 Tweetbot for Mac, Tweetro+'s developers have felt the need to charge a fairly high price because Twitter's API rules limit third-party apps to a maximum of 100,000 user tokens. Tweetro+ allows you to use two Twitter accounts at first, but additional in-app purchases can raise that limit to five …

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Tweetro says it’s ‘completely crippled’ by Twitter’s strict 100,000 user token limit

2012-11-11T13:18:22-05:00

Tweetro stats

Tweetro has fallen victim to Twitter's strict new API policies that were announced earlier this year. According to an email we received from Tweetro developers, the app saw a huge spike in downloads after the release of Windows 8, and rapidly reached its 100,000 user token limit. Users now receive a "cannot connect to service" error when trying to authenticate the application, and Tweetro developers say the app is "completely crippled" as a result.

Twitter originally said that developers would have until January or March of 2013 to comply with the platform's API changes, so Tweetro developers are questioning why their app has been cut off s …

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IFTTT disables Twitter Triggers in response to Twitter’s new third-party app policies

2012-09-20T16:58:30-04:00

ifttt

In response to recent changes in Twitter's increasingly stringent third-party app policies, web service IFTTT is removing all Twitter "triggers," which let you set up "recipes" to automatically push favorited tweets to Evernote, or crosspost tweets to Google+. In an email to users today, IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets specifically called out Twitter's new policy to "disallow uploading Twitter content to a cloud-based service" (Section 4A under heading I) that provoked a change. Additionally, IFTTT's quite useful ability to archive your tweets in a plain text file does not abide by Twitter's revised Developer Display Requirements, which mandate tha …

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Life after Twitter: StockTwits builds out its own ecosystem

2012-09-18T11:00:37-04:00

birdcage

As Twitter transforms from an open web platform to a more traditional media company, startups that built on top of it are leaving in search of new ways to grow their business. StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon doesn't mince words. "We've moved off the platform and so will everyone else. If we hadn't done that, we would be dead in the water."

StockTwits is a real-time micro blogging service, but one devoted to discussion of finance, markets, and the economy. It began largely as a community of users on Twitter, where it pioneered the use of the $ sign to collect conversations around certain stocks - a convention which Twitter recently copied, …

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As Twitter API v1.1 rolls out, controversial rules for developers start to take effect

2012-09-06T02:25:15-04:00

Twitter API fence

Twitter has released v1.1 of its API and updated the "Developer Rules of the Road" document to reflect the changes. There's been not a little controversy over the new rules of late, most notably over the theoretical 100,000 user limit placed on third-party Twitter clients. While we previously heard that developers will have six months to comply with the new API requirements, it's not yet clear what will happen to those that flout them. Twitter has, however, seen fit to clarify the user limit by stating that it only applies to clients that "replicate the core Twitter experience." Of course, this refers to clients such as Tweetbot, which has a …

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