Twitter: bringing third party developers to heel

A blog post from the Twitter folks:

If your application already has more than 100,000 individual user tokens, you’ll be able to maintain and add new users to your application until you reach 200% of your current user token count (as of today) — as long as you comply with our Rules of the Road. Once you reach 200% of your current user token count, you’ll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission.

Translation: if you Twitter client or social media management application gets a significant number of users, you’ll have to play by Twitter rules, and get permission from them to grow your client base. If you don’t, you’re capped at twice the number of users you have now.

I bet we’ll see the demise of many Twitter apps, and social media management apps conforming to Twitter’s vision exactly in the coming months.

Build your business on someone else’s platform, and you lose control of your business.

[via The Next Web]