A great overview by John Voorhees on the upcoming changes to Twitter’s APIs, which will have a serious impact on third-party developers. The key takeaway is that the new streaming API will become too costly for most developers to use unless Twitter offers steep discounts to those effected. The streaming API is what allows third-party clients the ability to stream newly published tweets into your timeline and offer real-time push notifications for likes, mentions, retweets, and direct messages. If individual developers aren’t able to reach an agreement with Twitter for affordable pricing, notifications within their apps will likely be delayed by 1-2 minutes.

I think it’s a damn shame that Twitter, a service that grew on the back of third-party clients, has such a terrible relationship with developers. It feels like there’s a new story every few months about some awful decision that negatively impacts developers and users of third-party clients. Eventually they’ll do something boneheaded enough to force us all onto another platform and the company will lose a large chunk of their most active users.

I certainly hope that doesn’t happen. But I have no evidence to support the idea that they’ll learn from their mistakes and start making decisions that benefit everyone in the community, regardless of what client they choose to use.