Lex Friedman writing for *Macworld*:

>*Macworld* has spoken with several developers behind third-party Twitter apps—or at least, we’ve tried. Some developers are notably hesitant to speak on the record, lest they incur Twitter’s wrath; the fear seems to be that since Twitter is now exerting more control than ever over access to its API—which developers leverage to make their Twitter apps work—that irking Twitter too much might result in a developer’s API access getting revoked.

>We also contacted Twitter for this article; the company has not responded.

I think that passage is incredibly telling and worrisome. Developers don’t want to talk because they fear the wrath of the hand that feeds them — sounds like an oppressive government regime, not a user-friendly internet company.

Say what you will about Apple randomly killing things, I’ve never seen a developer shy away from writing a damning blog post about Apple for fear they would get shut out of developing for Mac or iOS. Hell it took Gizmodo “stealing” from Apple before they were black-balled. The fact then that, presumably, more than one developer feels that way about Twitter should leave a sour taste in the mouth of every Twitter user.

The fact that Twitter has not responded to requests for comments is also interesting — while Apple does this, Apple also strategically leaks things to the press — often commenting to The Loop. Twitter seems to just be keeping their mouth shut and part of me thinks that this is because they too are confused by where they are headed.