Blog / Twitter cracking down

Ben Popper for The Verge, on Twitter restricting use of its API:

Major changes are coming in the next few months which will move Twitter from an open platform popular among independent developers towards a walled garden more akin to Facebook.

Oh please oh please oh please. Close up. Crack down. Do it. Now.

I’m not sure why I have something against Twitter. It’s not much of a thing. Just a mild distaste at the hype this site receives (plus I enjoy drinking the tears of the Twitter hipsters who lament the service’s popularity). My Twitter feed is idle for months, then dozens of tweets in a day as I live-tweet my thoughts about a video game. Facebook is crucial to my social life, but the disappearance of Twitter would hardly be noticed.

Remember when we were supposed to ignore the lamentations of iFixit over the retina MacBook Pro, because only third party repair companies care about fixing consumer hardware? Aren’t we now supposed to ignore the lamentations of people like Andrew Stone from Twittelator, because only third-party Twitter developers care about the precise app used to interact with Twitter?