Twitter seeks to restrict third-party developers Michael Sippey, director of consumer products at the San Francisco company, began by talking about Twitter's recent push into "expanded tweets" - allowing certain developers and publishers a way to include more information in their tweets than the standard 140 characters will allow. Back in March of 2011, my colleague Ryan Sarver said that developers should not 'build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.' Related to that, we've already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used. Among many innovations, Tweetie devised the action of "pulling" down on the timeline to refresh it - a gesture that quickly made its way into countless other apps, including Facebook's and (as of iOS 6) Apple's Mail client for iPhone. [...] again, whom do you trust more to build a beautiful mobile showcase for those new features - a company like Tapbots, or the company that turned Tweetie into the current version of Twitter for iPhone? Twitter's motivations are complicated by financial goals, user-growth targets and other aims that have muddied the look of its mobile apps. The prospect of third-party apps dying a sudden death has been met with generalized panic around geekier corners of the Internet. Nova Spivack, CEO of the "social dashboard" company Bottlenose, wrote an impassioned plea to Twitter executives that they reconsider the API restrictions.