Twitter gained a lot of popularity on the back of a vibrant third party ecosystem. Now that they're established, it seems that the have deemed those same third party developers a threat and have turned on them. Just another example of why basing your company on someone else's platform is a bad idea.
Perhaps they should be renamed to SPI - Service Programming Interface.
An API somewhat gives the impression of a programming interface that will execute valid instructions unconditionally and reliably. An SPI is different because it can fail, not because of a technical error, but because a human, for grins or otherwise, decided to cause the failure.
I think the definition of an "API" should be "can I, if necessary, replace it with my own implementation of the same thing?" If it isn't subject to the Liskov substitution principle it's something different.
No worries, I don't feel berated. These were hobby projects that people found useful, I have a full-time startup that gets the majority of my attention. So yes, making sure I share yet another cautionary tale. If you read Cappy's comment on my blog there's another excellent cautionary tale in there re FB
