I am a huge fan of Tweetbot. I bought it for iPhone, iPad and Mac. However, the longevity of these applications – especially Tweetbot for Mac – is suspect.
Back in August, Twitter announced some changes to their API. Specifically, in relation to token limits (i.e. individual users), they said:
if you are building a Twitter client application that is accessing the home timeline, account settings or direct messages API endpoints (typically used by traditional client applications) or are using our User Streams product, you will need our permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.
Put another way, once Tweetbot for Mac reaches 100,000 users it will no longer allow any new user to use the application.
First Victim
The good news is that Tweetbot for Mac has not reached that limit yet. However, another app that I used when testing Windows 8 has hit that ceiling – Tweetro. Over the weekend they tweeted and posted this article:
‘Cannot connect to service’ seems to be due to 100K token limit imposed by @twitter. We’ve reached out to them for confirmation, stay tuned.
— Tweetro App (@tweetroapp) November 10, 2012
Twitter are being heavy-handed, short-sighted and plain stupid. I understand there is a need for them to control the experience – target ads at its users – but a better solution must exist. It was, after all, third-party applications that brought the service to prominence.
The moral of the story is this: if you like a Twitter application, never revoke its access to your account.
