Late last week I reported that third party Twitter clients stopped working all of a sudden. That appears to be due to the fact that the API’s or Application Programming Interfaces that those apps rely on seem to have been revoked. This has been confirmed by Musk who are a pair a well known software analysts:
And to go further, 9to5Google is reporting that this revocation is intentional:
According to The Information today, a senior Twitter engineer internally communicated this week that the “Third-party app suspensions are intentional.” Other internal (Slack) communications seen by the publication reveal that Twitter is working on “approved talking points” for partners, but it’s not clear when they would be ready. That “3party clients revoked access” exchange occurred on Friday morning, and it’s unclear whether that information is for impacted third-party developers or advertisers.
Since then, Twitter, including the usually vocal Elon Musk, have not announced the removal of third-party apps. The company has no PR team, while developers of those clients have been similarly kept in the dark, and have resorted to their own messages explaining the situation.
The Information notes that “most of Twitter’s employees, including most people working on Twitter’s developer platforms” have been laid off.
Here’s why I believe that he’s doing this other than he woke up one morning and thought that this was a good idea as he does have a “ready, fire aim” mentality. He is likely using this to force people to abandon third party Twitter apps and use the native Twitter app as that would help to drive monetization as he desperately needs money.
Here’s the problem with that. Taking away choice from individuals is a sure way to drive them off the platform. But it’s worse if you’re a business. That’s because you may use a third party app to do a deep level of social media monitoring. As in what is the sentiment of your customers? Or are there issues that are trending related to you that you need to address? Even how stuff appears on Twitter is controlled by third party apps that businesses use. That sort of functionality isn’t going to be found in the native Twitter app and businesses would be less than pleased about being forced off the social media tools that they use. In fact, it seems to me that the number of Tweets from brands appearing on Twitter seems to have fallen sharply since this whole thing started. Now that’s just anecdotal to be clear. But if this is actually fact, then Elon has a huge problem on his hands. Revoking these APIs might be the final straw for businesses and advertisers who didn’t immediately head to the exits when Elon took over Twitter. Those businesses and advertisers will quit Twitter, depriving Elon of money and send Twitter into a death spiral that there will be no recovery from. And I don’t think it will make any difference if Elon gets a clue and restores API access tomorrow. He would have burned the last bridges with the people he needs to give him any shot at making back the $44 billion that he overspent to buy Twitter. And here’s the key thing. This will all happen very quickly. So quickly that Elon won’t know what hit him.
Great job Elon.