Winer on the Twitter Roadmap

Scripting News: “1. If you make a Twitter client, you have a bit of time to get out of that business. If you were thinking about writing one, don’t.”

I haven’t read the entire “consistency and ecosystem” post but there’s a lot of language in there around do’s and don’ts. A lot of it is to help make the service as good as it can possibly be, you don’t want, or need, a bunch of spammers abusing the API’s, right? Me neither, but what about Twitter advertising, or things like the #dickbar that had users of the Twitter iPhone client up in arms? What if your client WAS REQUIRED to show the #dickbar? How would you feel about that? Probably not so good.

Is it time for that distributed “Twitter-like” service without the single authority? Maybe.

If you’re a Twitter Client developer you’d better read the new Twitter API Terms of Service, now.