So Long, Tweetbot. Who Will Be Next?
We told you to snag access to endangered Twitter apps while you still could (we told you), but it seems that guidance is irrelevant. Sort of.
Whether you have access or not, your favorite Twitter apps likely will not be free (they can’t be with limited user tokens) . . . and the next likely step is that they will cease to exist.
Alarmist? Maybe. But maybe not.
Tapbots was trying to stay optimistic, even going so far as to assure itself users that there was no reason to panic about the future of Tweetbot – but there is reason for developers to panic, obviously.
As a result of Twitter’s new API restrictions, Tweetbot has shut off access to its Mac Alpha. Why? According to their blog post:
We’ve been working with Twitter over the last few days to try to work around this limit for the duration of the beta but have been unable to come up with a solution that was acceptable to them. Because of this we’ve decided its best for us to pull the alpha.
Tapbots, again, reassures themselves users that everything will be okay, noting that “Tweetbot for Mac will still be available for sale in the near future, we are just stopping the public part of the alpha/beta testing.”
But if Twitter is unwilling to work with developers on beta-testing, leaving them to appeal to users to “help 3rd party developers out and Revoke access to any clients that you no longer use” – does that really bode well for the future?
Developers will have to work closely with Twitter to get more tokens when the reach their 100k cap. Why do they think they’ll reach “an acceptable solution” with Twitter at that point if they can’t reach one now?
What do you think?
(Hands going under image from Shutterstock)
