Twitter Restricts Client Developers
New submitter atsabig10fo writes "Twitter has finally released the hinted-at changes to their API, which include limiting the number of users for third party clients, per-endpoint rate limiting, and restrictions on how tweets can be displayed and posted. Twitter's Michael Sippey wrote, 'One of the key things we've learned over the past few years is that when developers begin to demand an increasingly high volume of API calls, we can guide them toward areas of value for users and their businesses. To that end, and similar to some other companies, we will require you to work with us directly if you believe your application will need more than one million individual user tokens.' Third party app developers are certainly going to be sweating these changes, and it puts the future of new development in question."
I'm not sure why someone hasn't built a Twitter clone that just runs on top of IRC. Twitter is in many ways web IRC already.
It sounds like this might be in response to all of the reports of massive amounts of spam accounts: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/08/14/1851243/inside-the-real-economy-behind-fake-twitter-followers This might be one way to reduce the ease that the spam-twitter-herders work while at the same time providing a bit of income.