Twitter, which can in many ways thank third party developers for the great success it has enjoyed, is imposing wide-ranging restrictions on third-party developers going forward. They’ve been moving in this direction for awhile, and the latest announcement makes these changes official. Some time ago that made it clear that third-party clients are an endangered species — not only are they discouraging development in that area, but they have also been rolling out new features regularly without corresponding API calls. Now we see that they are imposing much tighter restrictions on API usage in general, and also restricting how content from Twitter can be incorporated into other Web sites.

My biggest complaint with Twitter’s evolution is that it feels like a bit of a bait and switch. More than most other social sites, Twitter owes a huge amount of its success to the creativity of its users and to its developers. Twitter developers have reliably stepped up to meet the needs of the community when Twitter’s official clients have failed to do so. Many of the interesting features Twitter has added were created organically by the community. @-replies, retweets, and hashtags were all bottom-up innovations that made Twitter more useful or more entertaining. Treating Twitter like a game was also a community-created feature, promoted by applications like Favrd and later Favstar.fm.

Now Twitter looks a lot like the big star who forgot about all the little guys that helped it get to the top. Twitter’s early openness was one of the major factors that attracted people like me to it over the closed, overly structured Facebook. Now, though, it looks like Twitter envies Facebook’s walled garden and wants to emulate it. At its best, Twitter has been “of the Internet” in a way that most of its competitors are not. I hate to see them intentionally throwing that away.

I’m not quitting Twitter or anything — I love Twitter. That said, I don’t think that the people who run the company are really in touch with what its users love the most about it.

I’d encourage you to read Marco Arment’s post Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes for a detailed critique. It really helped clarify my thinking on today’s announcement.

Andre Torrez wrote today about a lesson that I was lucky enough to learn fairly early in life. It’s that he’s not busy, and neither is anybody else:

So the final piece I have been working on is never telling people I am busy. Because no, I am not busy. Yes, I have a lot of stuff to do, but I leave it at the office after work and on the weekends. I have many things I am interested in, but I can always make room for something if it is worth doing.

Rather than say: “I am too busy, I don’t have any time for X.” I realize I can be honest and say I am not interested enough in X to do it.

When I was in college a friend of mine told me that he read the first section of the Wall Street Journal every day. I responded by saying I was too busy to do that. This was of course hilarious if only because I was a total slacker who managed to get in at least an hour or two of Tetris on the Nintendo every day no matter what else was happening. I also usually found time to play two or three hours of pick-up basketball and, if I was lucky, make a late night nacho run as well.

Anyway, when I made the patently absurd claim that I was too busy to do something, he told me that it wasn’t that I was busy, but that reading the paper was not a priority for me. It was such an obviously true statement that I immediately feel a twinge of shame every time I’m tempted to claim I’m too busy to do something to this day.

I learned this week that my college friend was just promoted to be Vice President and Controller at a big utility company.