Twitter is, hands down, my favorite web service. I’m reluctant to call it a social network, because to me it implies that you’re somehow using it talk to people. Most Twitter users are what we on the internet call “lurkers”. They read what other people have to say, but they don’t participate.
Semantics aside, Twitter started out as a service that anyone could build on top of using a set of APIs. Those APIs have become more restrictive over time, with one of the most hostile restrictions being the token system. Third party developers, for whatever reason, can only have 100,000 people using their app.
Had to un publish Falcon Pro… This is gonna be a bad day… Wanted to relax a bit after @droidconfr, guess not.
— Joaquim Vergès (@joenrv) June 19, 2013
Joaquim Vergès, the guy who writes my Twitter client of choice, Falcon Pro, woke up this morning to an email from Twitter saying he hit his 100,000 token limit. What’s odd about this email is that it came shortly after he reset Falcon Pro’s token system. See, Android being Android, his app is heavily pirated, and pirates use up tokens, thereby hurting people who actually paid for the app. Joaquim got around this by forcing all Falcon Pro users, legit or not, to re-login and grab another token.
Anyway, long story short, Falcon Pro has been pulled form the Google Play Store. Joaquim doesn’t really know what to do right now, and everyone on the internet kind of wishes Twitter would stop being so malevolent to the people who were responsible for making Twitter valuable in the first place.
