All external Twitter apps have a problem from Thursday
Bad news for anyone using apps like Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Tweetings, Talon, or any other app that starts with “T” and gives you the opportunity to manage your Twitter feed (s). The day after tomorrow, August 16, Twitter is going to remove their ‘streaming services’ and that means that those apps will no longer work, according to a joint website Apps of a Feather hot.
The problem is technical, but it means that Twitter has changed the way Tweets are sent to third parties. There is a new API that ensures that tweets are pushed from Twitter to the apps, but there is now a limit of up to 15 accounts. Companies like Tweetdeck of course have hundreds of thousands of accounts, but if they want to ‘pass’ all they have to pay for it, and not economically: $ 2900 per month for 250 users. That means a hefty 11 dollars per user per month, which means that all those apps have to increase their price considerably. According to their own calculations they have to ask at least $ 16 per month per user to only run kiet.
Less functionality for more money
And it is not the case that the developers of those apps have all the functionality that they still have. The automatic refresh of your timeline no longer works because the mechanism in the new API for doing that is only intended for web servers. You can work around it, but in the end it is the slowdown that you mostly notice in breaking news and events, exactly the moments when users of apps like Tweetdeck have to work.
Twitter does not seem to care about the apps, because the function they fulfill is completely undermined by this change. Twitter itself stated in a statement that the changes are intended for data purposes and not so much for what they call ‘client app product features’. Long story short: Twitter wants us to use Twitter ourselves, and makes other apps that offer extra functionality in this way very difficult. That is mainly bales for the people who make these apps, but many – especially business – users of the apps will now also have their hands in their hair.
Whether it will ultimately have an impact on the popularity of Twitter is difficult to say, but it certainly will not help. If it means in any case that fewer fake acounts will be used to throw all kinds of junk on Twitter, at least there will be something good.