Realistically, will developers just "grin and bear it" because of Twitter's popularity, or will they conclude that the risk is too great and stop Twitter-based development? My products (I'm in marketing) have mostly gone to end users, not developers, but when we've inadvertently dropped features, the customers have let us know - loudly - and we've either reinstated them or provided an alternative. - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

The problem here is that I, as an end user, don't understand the ramifications of most API changes (the exception being the unavailability of pagination in slandr). Are the developers educating the users on these changes? ("SuperWidget can no longer do A because Twitter did B so w can't do C and therefore can't do A any more.") - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

I'm trying to see a good side in all this. Twitter is in a downward spiral. - Bwana

The good side? Twitter will reposition itself to serve 50 million people, each with 10 friends, and each of whom will tweet 3 times per day. This audience will be gold for their advertisers - Geritol, Branson Tourism Board, and CBSNET. - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

Ontario, developers too have a responsibility to pass on the communication to their users. However, it doesn't make Twitter look good when a developer has to tell their users, "You can't use our app any more because Twitter's API crashed and won't let us operate any more". But you have a good point, and this is some of what Ev and Biz said in Scoble's video - developers can help by doing things like you mention. - Jesse Stay

Seriously, if Twitter wants to truly break through, they need to move out of their niche and into a mass market (where the tooth-challenged guy I saw at WalMart today will tweet the unavailability of McDonads value meal 7 to his family). But to reach that mass market, they need to cooperate with developers, not pull the rug out from under them. - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

How to crumble 101. Step 1 - Piss off your users. Step 2 - Piss off your developer community. Step 3 - Dead pool. - Bwana

Jesse, I owe you an apology; I only watched the first few minutes of the video. I'll have to view the rest to see the discussion you mentioned. - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

If only 5% of Twitter applications need that API call, how does removing it improve performance? It's not being used much anyway. - Morton Fox

Morton, the issue is of the 5% of the Apps affected, how many people were using those Apps, and how many of those users had thousands of followers or more? I don't know the answer, but you can see how a small API change on Twitter could affect thousands to tens of thousands of users. On SocialToo.com I only have about 200-300 users, but of those 200 users I probably reach about 20-30,000 of their friends. - Jesse Stay

No offense taken Ontario - Jesse Stay