Twitter tells developers to not make client apps

Twitter wants coherency in clients used to access its microblogging platform, and has issued stern guidance to developers to discourage them from developing clients to access the service.

In a Twitter API announcement on Friday, Ryan Sarver, of Twitter's platform team, wrote that developers should concentrate their efforts on "areas outside of the mainstream consumer client experience".

"Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no," Sarver wrote.

There are a variety of clients akin to Twitter's own one, including Tweetdeck.

However, Sarver said that existing developers of clients can continue to operate, as long as they "rigorously adhere to all areas of [Twitter's] Terms of Service".

Areas that Twitter wants developers to focus efforts on include additional services that plug-in to Twitter, such as Foursquare and Quora, and social CRM applications, such as Hootsuite.

In February, Twitter suspended three UberMedia-owned mobile device clients for violations of its policies regarding privacy, trademark infringement and changing the content of users' tweets.

In the note on Friday, Sarver wrote that existing client apps must not violate Twitters policies.

"I am so happy I cut the cord with Twitter long before they got to this point," blogger and scholar Dave Winer wrote on his blog in reaction to the announcement. "I'm pretty far along in doing a new user interface for microblogging, one without many of Twitter's limits. Had I been trying these ideas out on their platform, today is the day I would have become officially illegal."