Image via CrunchBase

This morning, Jesse Stay, who runs the SocialToo service for Twitter users, made a startling announcement about changes which will affect many of the 3rd party Twitter services we know and love. Effective later this week, applications will be limited to 20,000 requests per hour when accessing Twitter. That's bad.

That cap means that most third party, server side applications (like Jesse's SocialToo, or TweetStats, etc.) will practically be limited to no more than 20,000 users per hour, and in reality will be limited to many less. Part of the reason for this is Twitter's API, which has been designed in a way quite unlike the way these services access Twitter. Of course, there's no plans to improve the API and lessen the load which applications put on it.

These applications provide Twitter with much of it's value! While many users start off using the basic web interface, or text messaging, it doesn't take long for many of them to start making use of the third party services, such at TwitPic for linking photos to their tweets, or SocialToo for managing their follow lists. By limiting the functionality of these third party services, Twitter is limiting, and very likely reducing, its own value to its users. Of course, they could lessen the impact to their value by producing their own implementations of the popular services which build on Twitter, but they don't seem interested in doing that, either.

Limiting these services like this mean that it becomes much harder for those services to establish viable business models, and without those services, it will become more difficult for Twitter to ever monetize itself. But it seems that the folks behind Twitter don't even care about that. They seem happy relying only on funding from other sources, rather than working on becoming financially self sufficient.

Twitter could use this as a chance to begin earning money from users, or it could begin to offer premiums to users for subscription fees. However, they seem singularly uninterested in doing that. And with them strangling the services which provide it the most value, Twitter is essentially committing a slow, painful suicide.

Some developers who have been planning to connect to Twitter with their applications are now thinking otherwise. Why work for a system that shuts you out and kills itself when there are microblogging alternatives out there, ones that aren't so hell-bent on self destruction?

I hope that the team behind Twitter see the light and realize the damage they are about to do to themselves, before it's too late.

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