Twitter crack-down engulfs TweetBot for Mac alpha

Twitter's new regulations for third-party devs have claimed their first victim as the alpha of TweetBot for Mac is pulled.

The popular Twitter application was about to go into public beta but Twitter's new user caps meant it makes more sense to wait for a full release.

In a statement, Paul Haddad of Tapbots, explained: "Twitter's latest API Changes means now we have a large but finite limit on the number of user tokens we can get for Tweetbot for Mac.

"We've been working with Twitter over the last few days to try to work around this limit for the duration of the beta but have been unable to come up with a solution that was acceptable to them.

"Because of this we've decided its best for us to pull the alpha."

Numbers game

The reason being, that anyone who signs up for the alpha or beta, uses up one of TweetBot for Mac's user tokens. So even if they use it once, decide it's not for them and never open it again, they still count as one of TweetBot for Mac's users.

Each third party Twitter app can now only have 200,000 users – so every person who decides to ditch the app still counts as one of those users.

Despite pulling the public testing, TweetBot for Mac will still be released 'in the near future'.

You won't know when someone has posted from TweetBot for Mac though, as Twitter has decided to remove the tag on each tweet that says what app was used to create it.

This seemingly arbitrary removal is all part of Twitter's masterplan to get as many eyeballs on official Twitter products as possible.

Once again, it's a move that may be good for Twitter but is a bit annoying for Twitter users (or, at least, the stalking-inclined among us). Happily, you can still see this information on TweetBot for iPhone.

From TapBots