"We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.”
What utter bullshit. As though any user has ever been confused by a multitude of interfaces for something that consists of: a name and a couple lines of text.
While it's unfortunate that they're setting the precedent of discouraging certain uses of their API, it's also understandable. They're right to want their product to stay consistent and avoid fragmentation.
The irony of it is that they acquired their official client.
If Twitter wants cool apps, it better get around to building/supporting/documenting the @anywhere-to-oauth bridge, something Facebook (js-api to oauth) has had for a long, long time.
Edit: I see Seesmic mentioned as favored but the description sounds a lot different than what they describe their client as doing (that is, combining tweets with other alerts, something one might imagine would stand in the way of twitter's precious user experience).
Same thing with Trillian, which I use. I won't be using a standalone Twitter client for windows, so I guess it just means I won't be using Twitter if they remove the API access for them.
Right. A company providing a free service is probably looking to monetize your data, which is definitely a con job. Clearly you are being robbed by not monetizing your personal information directly.