Unfortunately, Twitter’s new API rules – the same ones that we expressed concern about as far back as July 9th – just took their first victim. TweetBot for Mac was either uncomfortably close to Twitter’s 100,000 user cap limit, or there was enough concern that it would get there sooner rather than later, as Tapbots has just taken down the TweetBot for Mac Alpha, citing concern over the new API rules as their primary reason for doing so.

In a blog post, Tapbots said the following:

As some of you may have already noticed the download link for the Tweetbot for Mac alpha no longer works. 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 solution that was acceptable to them. Because of this we’ve decided its best for us to pull the alpha.

Third party clients have been part of Twitter since the service’s inception, and it is increasingly worrying to many that the company has apparently decided to kill the clients, including many that are much loved.

Via: 9to5Mac
Source: Tapbots