Twitter don't want competition for their revenue

This was posted yesterday but for some reason disappeared! So I'm reposting this morning.

Yesterday Twitter told developers not to write any more twitter clients. Twitter want people to have a consistent experience across platform, and to avoid confusion in terminology used. To support this they they threw stats at us saying that 90% of users use official twitter apps to use the service, and that they are constantly withdrawing api keys from developers that have apps that break their terms of service in some way, such as breaking the user privacy rules. Which sounds right on and yah twitter for standing up for the little guy in all this.
But then I remember the current fiasco this week of the dickbar on the official twitter iPhone app. Which let's face it was basically twitter trying to exploit their app to bring in revenue from sponsored tweets being disguised as current trends. Initially this un-asked for feature obscured tweets in your timeline, now twitter in a recent update have changed that but exposed new/existing bugs.
But the dickbar tells us why twitter don't want new twitter apps and if they could do it I feel they would get rid of existing competition. Twitter want to sell ads, that's their business plan. To make that pay they need your eyeballs looking at them. Now if you are using some-one else's app to access twitter then you can't be looking at the ads they are getting revenue from.
So it is in twitters interest to try and discourage developers from competing with them and taking away their revenue.
And this move does make me mad. At the moment there does not seem to be much of a fuss being made. Which makes me madder because if this had been Apple everyone would have been bitching. This stinks of double standards and makes me even angrier but hey ho that's a story for a another post someday.
Now I like having a choice of twitter apps. As a recent iPad owner I'm looking for an app that has an interface I like and the functionality I want.
On my iPhone I have found that app and I am happy. But even the iPad version of that app doesn't cut it.
Twitter have managed to take what was a pretty good twitter app and ruin it (and that was long before the dicker fiasco), and in my opinion the iPad version is even worse.
But if twitter had their way there wouldn't be any choice for me, I would be stuck with their vision and nothing else.
Oh well I've ranted enough about this and provided no evidence to back my conspiracy theories up. All I've done is call it as I see it. Maybe you agree with what I have said, maybe you think I am talking total bollocks. If you are thinking this is bollocks next time twitter or anyone else come to think of it make their "we are doing it for the users" argument to justify a shady practice just apply those same standards of scrutiny and scepticism that you apply to Apple.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad