That's the problem. If anybody finds a way to build a successful business on Twitter, their interests are by definition not aligned with Twitter's, because Twitter themselves have not yet figured out how to build a successful business on Twitter. Losing more of Twitter's money to make third parties successful is not a basis for an alignment of interests.
That is only true given the current state of Twitter's product and business model. I think it's a stretch to say that they can't make the necessary changes to align interests. In fact, I think they're dead in the water if they can't. And Jack knows that.
Twitter could have gone to a royalty basis for API access from fairly early on.
If they required that developers with more than 100 users agree to pay $1:user:year, or %10 percent of gross receipts, whichever is greater, then app developers would have to have some means of making money, and the flowback would be to twitter, while still allowing for experimental apps to continue being developed.
Twitter cut off their nose despite their face here. Or for that matter, twitter itself could charge end users $10-15/year for being able to access their own account via API (anything but twitter's own client), and limit to X queries per day/month (something a real user is unlikely to exceed).. that would help keep the spam bots at bay.
