Were I a Twitter client developer, I would get in touch with other client developers and start talking about a way to do what Twitter does but that doesn’t require Twitter itself (or any specific company or service).

[…]

Under the hood, following somebody is really just subscribing to a feed of their statuses. Posting is really just updating a feed of your own statuses.¹

Brent Simmons writes about Twitter’s changes to its API rules and threats to third party developer. He brings up an interesting idea, that developers could create their own decentralized Twitter-like experience.²

Sure it would likely be just for geeks, but I think third party clients are almost exclusively used by more or less geeky people and Twitter itself was once used solely by geeks.

In the early days, the third-party ecosystem was a playground, in which developers could, and did, come up with uses for the service that were never intended or dreamed of by Twitter itself. You like the word ‘tweet’? The bird icon? The character counter? The replies and conversations features? A nice native client on the iPhone? All done first by third-party developer Iconfactory with its Twitterrific app.¹

To me, this is still the very thing that makes Twitter appealing. I’m a happy Twitterrific user, not a happy Twitter user. If third party clients would disappear, it’s very possible that I might stop using Twitter.

In other words, Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at?¹

Customer or cattle?